Santeria
Santeria
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
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