Over the course of their presence in the Americas, people of African descent have developed an amazing array of religious traditions in places as disparate as Uruguay, Peru, Mexico, Trinidad and Guyana. Among the most widely practiced of the Afro-Atlantic religions are Cuban Santeria (also known as Lucumí, or Regla Ocha), Brazilian Candomblé, and Haitian Vodou. While there is tremendous variety within and among these practices there are also a number of essential elements that are shared in greater or lesser measure by them all.
Like the ring shout, each of these three traditions is characterized by ritualized, collective music and dance rhythms – the primary means by which, on the continent and in the African diaspora, the sacred is honored and called into the human community. In these sister traditions, the circle dance is central to the experience of community and to the experience of worship. Long’s and Stuckey’s observations about the “binding” nature of the circle in the religion of Blacks in North America are strongly echoed in the experience of Candomblé in Brazil, for example, where the roda (sacred danced ring) is the means by which divinities from many different African ethnic communities are ritually called into communion – with each other and with their exiled generations.
Another characteristic shared among many Afro-Atlantic religions is a marked intimacy with spirit; a great sense of close, even familial relationship with divinity. The phenomenon of manifesting the spiritual energy of the deity in one’s body, ( “possession”), is evidence of the exceptional intimacy between humans and Spirit that characterizes most religions of the Afro-Atlantic diaspora.
The sacred spirits of Africa, in the Americas, are known by various names: Orishas, lwas, voduns, wintis, nkisis, among others. These terms have roots in one or more of the languages of West and Central Africa, but have essentially similar meanings – divinities; the divine presence in nature; manifestations of God; protective spiritual energies. Orisha, a Yoruba word, is probably the most popular single idiom due to the extraordinary visibility and prevalence of Yoruba influences in the New World.8 There exist hundreds of specific orishas within the pantheons of traditional practice in Nigeria, Benin, Togo, Cuba, Brazil, and Trinidad.
For example, Shango is the orisha of fire, the sacred manifestation of the energy of flame. He is also associated with thunder and lightning, justice, mountains, friendship, self-confidence and virility. He was said to have been a king of the Yoruba Oyo kingdom in ancient times and to have become a deity after death. Oyá is a warrior energy, a favorite wife of Shango and his partner in storm-making and battle. She is a strongly independent female energy who rules transformative change, and is represented in great winds and whirlwinds (hurricanes, tornados) that are capable of radically altering everything in their path. Like Shango, Oyá has a fiery temperament but can also represent the ardor of good friendship. Nanã Burukû is one of the oldest of all the orisha energies – an ancient creative force associated with still, muddy waters, like swamps. She represents a quiet, deeply placed wisdom and is as much associated with death as with life. In some of her myths, Nanã is said to be “older than God.”
The orishas, and the African and Afro-Atlantic deities of other names, represent an extraordinarily rich body of creative wisdom about the nature of the world and connections among all life in the universe. Within these religions, human beings are cared for and guided by protective spirits to whom individuals and families offer a reciprocal respect and honor. The relationship is a mutual one in which the orishas are venerated and cultivated with special foods, songs, dances, gifts and the ongoing energy and attention of devotees. The people, in turn, are assured of help and the constant accompaniment of their deities through the large and small vicissitudes of life.
Otanes: The motherlode: Cuban Santeria
The Afro-Cuban ritual tradition known as Santeria, Lucumí or Regla Ocha has roots in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century dispersal of the Yoruba kingdoms from areas that are now southeastern Nigeria and eastern Benin. In that period, the growth of Islam, a series of internecine wars, and especially, the slave trade, caused the scattering of hundreds of thousands of Yoruba-speaking people. Many of the men, women and children captured and enslaved were sent to work on the plantations and in the sugar mills of the Spanish and Portuguese colonies of Cuba and Brazil, respectively. These individuals were from parts of West Africa with tremendously rich and ancient artistic, intellectual and religious cultures.
Along with people from the Niger delta, the Calabar, the old Dahomey Kingdom, Kongo-Angola communities and other ethnic groups from West and Central Africa, the Yoruba helped form the foundation of what would become Afro-Cuban culture. The Yoruba deities, orishas (called “orichás” in Spanish) became major mythic symbols in Cuban life, and their music, dances, stories, foods and acumen yet inform multiple levels of popular culture on the island and in its diaspora.
The orishas of Santeria embody elements of nature. Changó is the mighty clap of thunder in rainstorm; Ochún is the sinuous grace of river water and freeflowing streams; Yemayá is the majestic maternal energy of the ocean; Ogun the solitude and strength of the ironmaking forest-dweller. For those who honor and cultivate these ancestral spirits, their aché (essential sacred energy; vital power) is concentrated in stones. Otanes. These lithic representations of the divinities’ presence and power are collected from places associated with the natural element of each. Ochún’s otanes come from riverbottoms and the banks of freshwater tributaries; those of Ochossi, the hunter king, come from inside the forest; the ritual stones of Changó are meteorites (thunderstones) or from the mountainous places where his energy is said to be strongest; and so on.
These otanes, once identified and collected for ritual purposes, are specifically consecrated with songs, sacrifices, prayers, and words of blessing and power from the community’s priestesses and priests. Most otanes are consecrated for individual devotees, linking their personal spiritual energy with that of the orishas who protect them and signifying that link through the stone. Some of the otanes are regarded as belonging not simply to an individual, but to a family line or an entire ceremonial community.
In Santeria (as in the Yoruba traditions on which Santeria is based) these stones are the motherlode, the place where the essence of the holy is concentrated; where that essence is fed. They are also the site from which that essence feeds back strength and blessing into the world.
courtesy: Rachel E. Harding
