An Introduction to Santeria

Excerpts taken from: Santeria from Africa to the New World: The
Dead Sell Memories
By George Brandon
To put Santeria into a proper perspective we have to place it into several
contexts simultaneously: global, New World, and local-national.
In global context Santeria belongs to the transatlantic tradition of Yoruba
religion, a religious tradition with millions of adherents in Africa and the
Americas, and should be seen as a variant of that tradition, just as there
are regional and doctrinal variants within the Christian, Buddhist, and
Islamic religious traditions. Santeria is a New World neo-African religion
with a clear dual heritage. Its component traditions include European
Christianity (in the form of Spanish folk Catholicism), traditional African
religion (in the form of Orisha worship as practiced by the Yoruba of
Nigeria), and Kardecan spiritism, which originated in France in the
nineteenth century and became fashionable in both the Caribbean and
South America.
Santeria is not unique. It is but one of the series of related Yoruba-based
religious forms that exist in the Caribbean, in Central and South America,
and now in the United Stated as well. Santeria is the Cuban variant of this
tradition. Shango in Trinidad and Grenada, Xango and Candomble in
Brazil and Kele in St. Lucia are other examples. Yoruba religion also
entered Haiti to compose there, along with Kongo-Angolan and
Dahomeyan practices, the kaleidoscope that is the religion of Vodun.
Santeria should also be viewed, then, in relation to its kindred New World
forms.
Yoruba religion and Santeria and really the greater part of this whole
African occult underground involve not the retention of African tradition
but rather the convergence of the reintroduction of African tradition by
immigrants from areas where African religions have been retained with
greater influence and greater fidelity with the purposeful revitalization of
that tradition by U.S. Blacks and Puerto Ricans.
COSMOLOGY AND PANTHEON
Since there has been no attempt by the Bini, Yoruba or Dahomeyans (Fon)
peoples at either sustaining or creating a systemized, orthodox body of
belief and doctrine, it is to be expected that there would be a great deal of
controversy and disagreement by scholars attempting to present these
religions as if they are one. One way of looking as these three religions is

as constituting a hierarchy of the powers and beings which compose the

universe and have a variety of relationships with each other. From this
perspective they form a common set of categories: the Supreme -being,
the spirits, humans, plants and animals, and non-living things.

The supreme- being. In Yoruba religion, this is Olodumare, the creator

and sustainer of the universe, who nonetheless is remote from humans
and has neither priesthood nor temples. Olodumare is never represented
pictorially and has no human attributes, although references make use of
anthropomorphic imagery and titles and praise names picture Olodumare
as a male. Among Olodumares other names is Olorun, meaning owner
of the skies or heavens.
The spirits. These superhuman beings are objects of worship through
temples and shrines and secret societies. In this category belong the
orisha and the Egungun. Some of the orisha (such as Obatala,
Oduduwa, and Orunmila) appear to have been around before the
creation of human beings and are therefore emanations directly from
Olodumare. They came from heaven. Others were once human beings
and died remarkable deaths. They sank into the ground or rose into the
heavens on chains; they committed suicide and did not die; they turned to
stone. Their death was not an end but the occasion for their
metamorphosis into an Orisha. It should not be thought that the concept
of orisha is readily verbalized or even needs verbalization when it is so
much a part of the presumed background against which life takes place.
The orisha are the guardians and explicators of human destiny. It is they
to whom people turn for help, aid, and advice in the great and small
problems of life.
When William Bascom was able to get two high priests to give him
accounts of the concept of the orisha, which underlay their worship, they
told him that:
An orisha is a person who lived on earth when it was first
created, and from whom present-day folk are descended. When
these orishas disappeared or turned to stone, their children
began to sacrifice to them and to continue whatever ceremonies
they themselves had performed when they were on earth. This
worship was passed on from one generation to the next, and
today an individual considers the orisha whom he worships to be
an ancestor from whom he is descended. The tradition is

accepted by all groups of the Yoruba tribe, and apparently in a

modified form in Benin and Dahomey. (1994:21)
Worshippers of an orisha are spoken of as being its children. The idea of
descent was translated into secrecy by excluding from some part of an
orishas ceremonies all those who were not themselves children of the
orisha. While some orisha are widely worshipped throughout the Yoruba
territories and even into areas west and east such as Dahomey and Benin,
others have purely local following, and there is much variation in the
rituals and mythology of the deities in the different regions. Myth names
the city of Ife as the birthplace of most of the orisha, which means that for
Ife residents most of the orisha are of local origin. The wide spread of the
worship of deities closely associated with Oyo such as Shango, Oya,
Oba, Yemoja, Oshosi, Orisha Oko and Erinle is undoubtedly the
result of both the centralizing influence Oyo wielded as the dominant
Yoruba city-state over several hundred years and the dispersal of Oyos
population after the city fell to conquest.
Although the orisha may be regarded as ancestral by its
worshippers, it is not in the same category as a persons immediate
ancestors or the founder of the compound in which one lives. These latter
are the Egungun, who receive separate veneration at shrines within the
household and compound. At the village level there was a secret society
of male maskers, the Egungun Society, which impersonated the
ancestors of the community as a whole at major festivals. Ancestor
veneration also existed at the national level in terms of the cult of the
royal ancestors. While the orisha are concerned with the minutiae of
individual destinies, the ancestors are concerned with the moral and social
order of society and with adherence to public norms. The role of the
ancestors was not to ensure individual achievement and satisfaction,
although they remained interested in the fates of their descendants; it
was to undergird the continued existence of society and of a just social
order at all levels. As manifestations of the communal ancestors, the
Egungun maskers embody a moral force still resounding from the time
when all human institutions first came into existence. Since their word is
law, they can mediate and judge disputes and cleanse the community of
illness and witchcraft (Lawal 1977:59). More than anything else they
embody the conquest of death by the techniques and rituals of
immortality and the return of the dead from their world to renew their
strong bonds with those they still love. For this reason they are welcomed
at their annual festivals with great joy.
Humans. This category includes those living people who are visible and
those about to be born. Among them are kings, witches, priests, twins, all

of whom are believed to have special powers for both good and evil.
Human beings exist at the centre of the universe, though not as its
master. Their ability to carry out rituals gives them an awesome
responsibility because it is unique. Only humans can carry out rituals on
behalf of all other beings; only humans can sacrifice and empower objects
with ashe. Humans also had to depend on each other and ensure the
harmony of their communities by conforming to the moral and religious
order of government, kinship values, taboos, and interaction with the
dead. As a result divinity and the sacred were closely associated with
ecology and with human relationships.
Plants and Animals. These constitute the environment in which humans
exist and their means of survival and nourishment. In turn they depend
on humans as well. Plants in particular are sources of both healing and
food, while knowledge of the individual characteristics of animals, birds,
and insects is important to hunter and farmer alike. Plants, animals,
insects and humans all ultimately depend on the bounty of the earth,
which is deified as Onile and has an important secret society, the
Ogboni, connected with it.
Nonlivingthings. Things such as stones, clouds, rivers, and pieces of
iron, which we might regard as not having biological life, are seen as being
alive, as having will, power, and intention, just like persons. The sky with
its stars, sun, thunder, lightning, meteors, and moon, was the residence of
Olorun and the deities. Much of what goes on there is a counterpart of
what happens on earth. It is simply the land of the dead and the orisha
with a vast population which usually sees everything from its own vantage
point on the other side of the visible sky.
Encircling this whole hierarchy of beings is an encompassing energy, ashe,
which permeates the entire universe. All of the powers (the orisha, the
ancestors, the forces and actions of nature, perhaps even the supremebeing itself) are manifestations of this absolute and indefinable power. It is
ashe which ties together all of the entire ontology and embraces the
interpenetration of all beings. It becomes the responsibility of the orishas
human descendants to transmit to subsequent generations the objects
and the secrets that give them a measure of control over the orisha. The
objects become the material support of that orishas ashe, and everything
that went into forming the object, from leaves, earth, and animal bones to
the incantations that praised and coerced the power to lodge in one place,
becomes part of its secret.
It is ritual which allows humans to traverse all the categories of
being through the manipulation and communication of ashe. The various

forms of divination allowed people to have access to the accumulated

wisdom of the deities and the dead as the paradigms for solving current
problems. Offerings of food, objects, song, money, or the blood of animals
in sacrifice all revivified the ashe of the orisha and directed it toward
specific ends. In ceremonial spirit possession, the link between the orisha
and its descendants became palpable as, in ceremonies held in its honour,
the immaterial being came down from on high and took over the body of
one of its children, communicating to the assembly in a visible, physical,
human form. Last but not least, it is the ashe in the priestess and the
herbs, in the blood of the animal and the chants of praise and
supplication, that heals the sick and forestalls death in rituals of affliction.