Introduction to Santería
This post is the beginning of a series introducing you to the Afro-Cuban religion of Santería.
This is the religion I practice alongside my participation in the local Unitarian Universalist Congregation. In this first post, I will talk about the history of this religion, from its origins in West Africa to its settlement in the United States and other countries of the Americas and around the world. Future posts will look at ideas about the cosmology and our place in it. Then we will consider our relationship with our ancestors, and finally, I will do an introduction to the Orisha, the deities of this pantheon. If you want to know more about this religious tradition, I would encourage you to pick up my book Santeria: Correcting the Myths and Uncovering the Realities of a Growing Religion available from Amazon.com as either a hard cover or ebook.
https://www.nps.gov/NR/TRAVEL/AMERICAN_LATINO_HERITAGE/Gullah_Geechee_Cultural_Heritage_Corridor.html
The history of this religion is closely tied to the history of West African people in the Americas, especially the Yoruba peoples of southwestern Nigeria and eastern Benin. Little is known about the earliest inhabitants of this region. The people we identify today as the Yoruba were not the first to inhabit the areas we commonly associate with them today. Scholars suggest an earlier people, represented by the Nok terra-cotta heads discovered in Northern Nigeria, populated the area from around 900 BCE to 200 CE or earlier. The Yoruba peoples who later populated this area did not see themselves as a single group, but their shared language and cosmology brought them together. By 950 CE these peoples had a highly developed artistic and ritual center in Ile-Ife, the city-state that became the spiritual and cultural center of Yoruba culture They had one the oldest and finest artistic traditions in Africa and by 1100 CE there was a well-defined artistic tradition that produced highly naturalist sculpture in terracotta and stone, followed by works in copper, brass and bronze. And by the 1400s the city-states of this region had been brought together into a kingdom centered on the city of Oyo.
By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Yoruba-speaking peoples of southwestern Nigeria and eastern Benin were among the most urbane of the sub-Saharan civilizations. Art, religion and dance flourish and their metal working was superior to its European counterpart. A culture of war also flourished, and it was the captives from these wars that were delivered into the European slave trade.
The Yoruba were latecomers to the slave trade, not contributing significant numbers until the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries in both the Caribbean and the United States. Only about nine percent of the Africans brought to the Americas were from Yoruba-speaking areas, and most of those were delivered to St. Domingue (Haiti), Cuba and Bahia. It was from that small group in Cuba that the contemporary religions of Santería, Candomblé and their cousins were developed.
There is no accurate census of people who take part in or who are familiar with the religious system we place under the umbrella of Yoruba religion today. However, almost twenty-five years ago Sandra Barnes estimated that “[m]ore than 70 million African and New World peoples participate in, or are closely familiar with, religious systems that include Ogun [one of the many Yoruba deities], and this number is increasing rather than declining” (Barnes, 1). Although birthed in Africa and refined among the gente de colores (free people of color) of Cuba, today Santería has spread throughout the Americas and beyond. It has also attracted many members who do not share its progenitor’s Yoruba racial or ethnic heritage. This has led many scholars to include this tradition among the major religions of the world.
As with others of the enslaved, the Yoruba brought to the New World their music, religion and culture. Primarily in the Cuban capital of Havana, but also throughout the island freed and enslaved members of the Yoruba language speakers set up enclaves of their culture in the cabildos and confraternities. Because the Cuban authorities preferred that Africans be separated according to their ethnic heritage, most of these organizations were bastions of a single African culture. Thus, through singing and dancing, the celebration of holidays and public and private rituals, the Yoruba-speaking people were able to reconstitute large portions of their indigenous culture. After Cuba gained it freedom from Spain, many of these cabildos were put under tighter scrutiny and it appears the religion that developed there, known today as Santería or Lukumi, moved into the homes of its practitioners where it continued to develop and evolve.
Because of its proximity to the Florida mainland, Cuba has had relationships with the developing United States from before its beginning as an independent nation. However, it wasn’t until the Cuban Revolution of 1959 that significant numbers of Cubans migrated to the United States. Together with a second wave of refugees who left Cuba from the port of Mariel in 1980, Cubans, devotees of the Yoruba Orisha, have made a significant impact on American religion in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These first immigrants settled in south Florida and the New York/New Jersey areas. Today, however, there are practitioners throughout the country and around the world. Scholars estimate there are more Orisha devotees in the United States than in Cuba, and with the publication of Stephen Prothero’s God is Not One, this religion is taking its rightful place among the “religions that run the world.”
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