Santería, also known as Regla de Ocha, La Regla Lucumi or Lukumi,[1][2] is a syncretic religion of West African and Caribbean origin influenced by Roman Catholic Christianity. Its liturgical language, a dialect of Yoruba, is also known as Lucumi.
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Priests are commonly known as olorishas or owner of Orisa. Once those priests have initiated other priests, they become known as babalorishas, "fathers of orisha" (for men), and as iyalorishas, "mothers of orisha" (for women). Priests can commonly be referred to as Santeros and Santeras (depending on gender), and if they function as diviners (using cowrie-shell divination known as Diloggun) of the Orishas they can be considered Italeros, or if they go through training to become leaders of initiations, Obas or Oriates.
Considered to be highest in rank are priests of Ifá (pronounced ee-fah), which in santeria is an all male group. Ifá Priests receive Orunmila, who is the Orisha of Prophecy, Wisdom and Knowledge. Once this happens they are known by the title Babalawo, or "Father Who Knows the Secrets".
In recent years, a particular practice of the traditional Yoruba Ifa priests (from Nigeria) has come to the diaspora of initiating women to be Iyanifa or "Mother of Destiny", but Lucumi practitioners do not typically accept this practice due to their interpretation of the Odu Ifa Irete Untelu which states woman cannot be in the presence of Olofin (otherwise known as Igba Iwa Odu) and so cannot be initiated as divining priestesses. This is a major difference between traditional Lucumí Ifa practitioners, and some traditional Yoruba practitioners from Oshogbo and, since the 1980s, Ile Ife. Instead, a woman in Lucumi is initiated as Apetebi Ifa, a "bride of Ifa", and is considered senior in Ifa to all but a fully initiated Babalawo. There was little evidence of Iyanifa existing in West Africa until very recently, so the existence of the Iyanifa is likely to be of modern origin in Yorubaland, and it is probably due to this reason that it does not appear in the Cuban variant. The foremost Western academic authority on Ifa, William Bascom, traveled throughout Yorubaland studying the Ifa cult in a series of visits in 1937–1938, 1950–1951, 1960 and 1965, and never encountered a single Iyanifa nor was he told of their existence by any of his informants.[3] However, Maupoil, in his 1943 work, does mention he encountered a woman Ifa diviner in Dahomey.[4]
Santería is a system of beliefs that merges the Yoruba religion (which was brought to the New World by slaves imported to the Caribbean to work the sugar plantations) with Roman Catholic and Native Indian traditions.[2] These slaves carried with them various religious customs, including a trance for communicating with their ancestors and deities, animal sacrifice and sacred drumming.
In Cuba, this religious tradition has evolved into what we now recognize as Santería. In 2001, there were an estimated 22,000 practitioners in the US alone,[5] but the number may be higher as some practitioners may be reluctant to disclose their religion on a government census or to an academic researcher. In Puerto Rico, the religion is extremely popular, especially in the towns of Loiza and Carolina.
Of those living in the United States, some are fully committed priests and priestesses, others are "godchildren" or members of a particular house-tradition, and many are non-committal clients seeking help with their everyday problems. Many are of Black Hispanic and Caribbean descent, but as the religion moves out of the inner cities and into the suburbs, a growing number are of African-American and European-American heritage.
"The colonial period from the standpoint of African slaves may be defined as a time of perseverance. Their world quickly changed. Tribal kings and their families, politicians, business and community leaders all were enslaved and taken to a foreign region of the world. Religious leaders, their relatives and their followers were now slaves. Colonial laws criminalized their religion. They were forced to become baptized and worship a god their ancestors had not known who was surrounded by a pantheon of saints. The early concerns during this period seem to have necessitated a need for individual survival under harsh plantation conditions. A sense of hope was sustaining the internal essence of what today is called Santería, a misnomer (and former perjorative) for the indigenous religion of the Lukumi people of Nigeria.
"In the heart of their homeland, they had a complex political and social order. They were a sedentary hoe farming cultural group with specialized labor. Their religion, based on the worship of nature, was renamed and documented by their masters. Santería, a pejorative term that characterizes deviant Catholic forms of worshiping saints, has become a common name for the religion. The term santero(a) is used to describe a priest or priestess replacing the traditional term Olorisha as an extension of the deities. The orishas became known as the saints in image of the Catholic pantheon." (Ernesto Pichardo, CLBA, Santería in Contemporary Cuba: The individual life and condition of the priesthood.
As mentioned, in order to preserve their authentic ancestral and traditional beliefs, the Lukumi people had no choice but to disguise their orishas as Catholic saints. When the Roman Catholic slave owners observed Africans celebrating a Saint's Day, they were generally unaware that the slaves were actually worshiping one of their sacred orishas.[6] Due to this history, in Cuba today, the terms "saint" and "orisha" are sometimes used interchangeably.
This historical "veil" characterization of the relationship between Catholic saints and Cuban orisha is made all the more complicated by the fact that the vast majority of santeros in Cuba today also consider themselves to be Catholics, have been baptized, and often require initiates to be baptized as well. Many hold separate rituals to honor the saints and orisha respectively, even though the faith's overt links to Catholicism are no longer needed.
The traditional Yoruba religion and its Santería counterpart can be found in many parts of the world today, including Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, and even the United States, which was mainly the result of mostly Cuban and Puerto Rican migration. A very similar religion called Candomblé is practiced in Brazil, along with a rich variety of other Afro-American religions. This is now being referred to as "parallel religiosity"[7] because some believers worship the African variant that has no notion of a devil and no baptism or marriage, yet they belong to Catholic or mainline Protestant churches, where these concepts exist.
Operating independently of the historical syncretism described above, there are now individuals who mix the Lukumí practices of Cuba with traditional practices as they survived in Africa after the deleterious effects of colonialism. Although most of these mixes have not been at the hands of experienced or knowledgeable practitioners of either variant of the system, they have gained a certain popularity.
In 1974, the Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye became the first Santería church in the United States to become officially incorporated.[8]
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