The article tries to show how conceptions of time, learning and knowledge, typical aspects of Candomblé, are a constituent part of African culture and people that instituted the orixás religion in Brazil . The idea of life and death, birth and reincarnation, as well as the cult to the ancestors and to the orixás, as conceived in African soil, was reproduced in Brazil in conformity with those conceptions. With the transformation of Candomblé in a religion not only restricted to afro-descendants and its propagation around the country, congregating followers inserted in the world of work and of controlled learning, based on the capitalist notion of time, the Western conceptions undermine the African concepts of time, especially those concerning knowledge, changing the initiation practices and the constitution of authority, hierarchy and the religious power in the terreiros (yards), provoking deep changes in the religion.
Time and religion; Time and religious hierarchy; Time and initiation; Time in Afro-Brazilian religions