Between Leaves, Prayers, and Healing Hands: A Cross-Regional Scoping Review of Ritual Healers and Plant-Based Community Knowledge

Plant-based healing practices integrate botanical resources, ritual speech, gesture, faith, spiritual mediation, protection, and social recognition within complex community systems of care. This cross-regional scoping review mapped the traceable literature on plant-based knowledge associated with benzedeiras, benzedores, rezadeiras, rezadores, and functionally analogous specialists. The formal scoping-review corpus comprised 54 records retrieved through structured database searches. A separate contextual layer of 132 supplementary records, identified through citation tracking and targeted searches using emic specialist terms, broadened interpretation but was not treated as methodologically equivalent to the PRISMA-derived corpus. Across the 186 analytical records, 74 harmonized specialist terms and 212 botanical entries associated with therapeutic, ritual, spiritual, or community-based practices were identified. The botanical matrix comprised 68 families and 166 genera, with Lamiaceae, Asteraceae, Solanaceae, and Fabaceae as the most represented families. The results reveal terminological diversity, regional asymmetries in documentation, and the predominance of broad labels alongside terms with greater emic density. Plants operate as pharmacological resources, ritual supports, spiritual mediators, instruments of protection, territorial markers, and performative elements of healing. These specialists should be understood as mediators of complex therapeutic systems. The findings represent the indexed and traceable supplementary literature analyzed and should not be interpreted as a comprehensive inventory of ritual healing traditions worldwide.