Since Jorge Amado's publication of Jubiabá, endless cycles of quotation have effected a genuine proliferation of Candomblé imagery in Bahia's public sphere. Quoting, as I have stated before, is always a procedure that produces distance. It removes you from the source. It takes the heat out of things, so to speak. ‘Look, it has been said before! I’m only quoting!’ Yet it also creates little pipelines between fields that were hitherto unconnected. Through these pipelines the color of the quote – its feel, its temperature, its texture – is passed on to the new surroundings in which it was inserted. In this process, both the quote itself and its new context are bound to change their meaning.

In Salvador, the process of quoting Candomblé has now reached a stage that is exemplified by the advertisement campaign of Tidelli garden equipment: the orixás are only recognizable as such because of the presence of emblematic symbols (Xangô's fire, Iemanjá's hand-held mirror, Oxóssi's bow-and-arrow, Iansá's sword). Other than that, they look like the hip members of a young, urban party crowd – beautiful, seductive, desirable – and they are supposed to confer meaning onto garden chairs and garden tables. With the Tidelli posters we are light-years away from Dr Nina's ill-lit, messy terreiros, or Jorge Amado's sweaty, foaming ceremonies. And yet, some echoes of these earlier renditions of the Candomblé universe remain.

Quotations of Candomblé such as the Tidelli campaign are all over the place in the public sphere of contemporary Salvador. To evoke the sheer density of Candomblé imagery in Salvador, and the accompanying sensation that these images are in a process of ‘drifting out of meaning’, I was tempted to proceed this chapter with a rather unorthodox form of ethnographic description, namely to simply ‘show it all’: to start a plain enumeration of the manifestations of Candomblé's public forms that would go on-and-on-and-on, page after page, so as to end up with a text resembling that famous Borgesian project of making a map of the empire on a scale of one to one.