Even though both Palo and Ocha/Santo/Lucumí are represented in Western scholarship as African-derived “religions,” the concept of “religion,” understood as a discrete area of human existence, clearly distinguished from or even opposed to “the secular” or “the profane,” as illustrated in the institutional Abrahamic traditions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), does not do justice to the worldview and integrative nature of these Reglas or Rules. And if the word “religion” is used in the context of this project, this conceptual consideration should be kept in mind. As Todd Ramón Ochoa observes in Society of the Dead: Quita Manaquita and Palo Praise in Cuba, these sacred spaces are better conceptualized as “inspirations,”19 rather than “religions” as commonly understood.
Palo is a Kongo-inspired cosmology, a worldview based on the relationship among the unborn, the living, and the dead, a relationship mediated through a central object called prenda. The word prenda is a complex term, with a rich range of meanings, ranging from the literal to
18 See for instance Thornton’s book, The Kongolese Saint Anthony.
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the metaphysical. On the literal level, prenda is a complex combination of physical elements, ceremoniously and carefully put together and housed in a container that is usually a cauldron or a pot. On a more metaphysical level, prenda is also a body of knowledge of the bankulu, the ancestors, and an epistemology, a way of accessing that body of knowledge. The spirit of the dead, known as mfumbi, is summoned when needed, being a reliable vital energy or magical enforcer who carries out the invoker’s will, whether to heal or to harm. Like a knot, the prenda is a crossroad of forces, a zita, where people’s fate can be “locked,” “tied” [kukanga zita], harmed, or “unlocked,” “untied” [kukutula zita], healed, in an interdependent dynamic called kanga- kutula. As Robert Farris Thompson notes, the Bakongo lack a complex pantheon of deities, but “they have, instead, a complex system of nkisi (‘sacred medicines’), which they believe were given to humankind by God. The religion of Kongo presupposes God Almighty (Nzambi Mpungu), whose illuminating spirit and healing powers are carefully controlled by the king (mfumu), the ritual expert or authority (nganga), and the sorcerer (ndoki).20 It should be added that the king [mfumu] and the priest [nganga] exercise also the functions of a warrior [kesa]. When the African slave trade displaced the Bakongo to Cuba, the Kongo beliefs, practices, and language combined with those of other people taken into slavery from the African region and those of the people they found on the ground in Cuba to create the diverse and dynamic Kongo- inspired systems of praise called Reglas de Congo. Palo has four branches, each with
idiosyncratic conceptual, ritual, musical, and linguistic characteristics. These branches are Palo Mayombe, Palo Monte, Palo Briyumba (Villumba, Vriyumba, or Biyumba), and Palo Kimbisa.21
20 Robert Farris Thompson, Ibid., p. 107. 21 Ochoa, Ibid., p. 9.
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It is important to note that even though Palo is African-inspired and seems to posit itself as an alternative to the branches of Abrahamic religion that developed in Europe and were exported outside Europe, like the Catholic Christianity that the Spanish imported to Cuba, the encounter on the island, again occurred at that zita, that knot, so characteristic of Palo. The “right-hand” path, or healing path, of Palo uses the prenda cristiana (“Christian prenda”), while the “left-hand” path, or harming path, uses the prenda judía (“Jewish prenda”). This aspect of conceptualization does not exist in Kongo culture in Africa. It developed as a creative
appropriation and transformation of the Catholic doctrine as European slaveholders and African- Kongo slaves struggled for power and control of fate in this space that was Cuba’s slave society. As Ochoa states, “the use of the terms cristiana and judía is an open adoption of nineteenth- century Spanish Catholic ideas concerning good and evil in an ethnocosmic register. These ideas were constantly elaborated and constantly renewed through the difference marked by the term ‘Jew’ in Spain from the medieval through the colonial period, if not to the present.”22 The use of the term “Jew” as opposed to “Christian” also seems to have been used by the Spanish as a form of religious control, a way to force existential compliance on the Africans. In Reglas de Congo, Cabrera’s informants seem to make this point. “El Intrépido no tenia capilla con capellán y santos blancos. Había que ir a la iglesia para bautizar a los negritos. El que no estaba bautizado por lo católico, se oía llamar judío. As ese lo abochornaban.” [“The ingenio El Intrépido did not have its own chapel with a chaplain and white saints. In order to baptize the Negro children, people had to go to the neighborhood church. Those children who were not baptized in the Catholic Church were called judíos or Jews. And they were taunted.”]23
22 Ochoa, Ibid., p. 205.
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Palo is a hierarchical membership society, open to both males and females. The first level of the hierarchy is occupied by the tata (male) and the yayi (female). They are the makers and keepers of the original prenda. They and the prenda they keep (which is called Fudamento or “the Founding Prenda”) are the “father” and the “mother,” and, ideally, in due time, they will “reproduce” spiritually and have spiritual “children,” disciples or students. Thus each one can become a padrino [godfather] or a madrina [godmother]. The second level is occupied by the padre and the madre. The third level is occupied by the ngueyo, the neophyte or newly initiated. Access is achieved through “initiation,” the formal introduction and welcome into the society.
At the center of Palo, besides the act of making the prenda itself, is Palo craft or trabajo, “work” (either to heal fate or to harm fate), during which the prenda is actually used and its power as a zita, a knot, is demonstrated. The mfumbi, working through the prenda is invoked and commanded to act. Sacred songs are chanted, dance steps are performed, and offerings are made to the mfumbi through the prenda. These offerings can be solid food items (like animals), liquids (aguardiente, wine, which the officiant sips without swallowing and, through the mouth, uses to “spray” or “aspire” the prenda), or gases (tobacco, which the officiant “smokes” and, in directed puffs, uses to “fumigate” the prenda). Thus, through the prenda functioning as a zita, the living and the dead commune on all three levels of matter: the solid, the liquid, and the gaseous. During this ceremony, one of the attendees can get into a trance state and be “mounted” or “possessed” by the mfumbi, thus performing acts of healing, “untying,” or providing needed answers to questions, resolutions to issues, or solutions to problems. The officiant can also use fula, or gun powder, “exploded” as an instrument of divination and another kind of zita to divine or “read” fate, usually also using a firma or signature, a complex combination of geometrical figures and signs drawn on the floor with white clay or chalk. The general practitioners of Palo are known as
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palero (the male) and palera (the female), and for the specific branches they would be mayombero/mayombera, or kimbisero/kimbisera.
Like Palo, Ocha/Lucumí, also known as Santo or Santería, is an African-derived inspiration that developed and carved up a vital portion of the existential space in Cuban slave society and still maintains a position of prominence today in Cuban society and culture. As Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert suggest in their book, Creole Religions of the Caribbean, “in the final stages of the slave trade, Yoruba-speaking groups dominated, primarily from the southwest of Nigeria and from Dahomey, Togo, and Benin. They contributed most directly to the tradition that would come to be known as ‘Lucumí’ (the name given to Yoruba-speaking people in Cuba and to the religious practice of Regla de Ocha, the rule or religion of the Oricha, considered a variant of the Lucumí religious tradition).”24
In order to appreciate the development of Ocha/Santo/Lucumí, one has to understand the development of Catholicism in the Americas. Roman Catholicism was the only religion officially permitted on the island of Cuba. Even though Spanish Conquest and its contingents of
conquistadores or conquerors is generally seen as accompanied by dedicated missionaries assiduously engaged in the Christianization of the New World, a more accurate image is that colonial expeditions included fewer priests who practiced the official Church religion and more humble people who, back home in Spain, practiced a form of folk religion. Just like the Africans, these European settlers brought to Cuba their home traditions. Despite certain variations, these Spanish men and women shared a strong devotion to the Catholic saints who were seen as intermediaries between humans and a mysterious God, not unlike the mysterious Nzambi
Mpungu Lulendo of the Bakongo. In a sense, having graduated from the School of Life as human
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beings, the saints were like alumni who knew what it means to be human because they “had been there before” not that long ago. Therefore, they were closer to humans and they understood human needs and struggles better than God, who lives in a non-human world. Again, this view of life beyond the living is not unlike the view of the bankulu, the ancestors, among the Bakongo.
Developing in the sociocultural matrix of the Greek Empire and the Roman Empire, Christianity inevitably borrowed much from the folk Greek religions and Roman religions of Antiquity. The New Testament, after all was originally written in koine Greek, or popular Greek (as opposed to scholarly Greek), and later translated into vulgate Latin (again, popular Latin, as opposed to scholarly Latin), mainly by Saint Jerome, so that the common people of the Roman Empire could be acquainted with the Scriptures.25 Just as Greek and Roman deities were specialized, Catholic saints likewise became specialized, specializing in the healing of specific diseases, the awarding of specific favors, general protection, or the protection of people engaged in specific types of activities. Even though the Catholic Church eventually took to “canonizing” or authorizing saints, the belief in and veneration of saints was a grass root development that the Church hierarchy was compelled to take over and regulate in order to maintain a certain sense of control of the direction that the religion was taking. This is the type of Catholicism that prevailed in Cuba when the Lucumí people began to arrive on the island, and a combination of
demographic and institutional factors allowed for religious syncretism. For the Africans, acculturation was a means of survival. In the slave society, this meant adopting this particular Catholicism of the masters, at least in the open. As the title of Frantz Fanon’s book, Peau noire, masques blancs, suggests, in order to survive in this new space, on their “black skin,” the slaves
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had to put on “white masks.”26 Or to express it another way, “the Negro… [had to get] a white soul.”27 Just as had been the custom in Spain, in Cuba the colonial administration allowed Church-sponsored mutual aid organizations for the Africans, called cabildos de nación and formed on the basis of ethnic origin (naciones). These were based on the mutual aid religious confraternities, or cofradías, that had existed in Europe in the Middle Ages. While the Counter- Reformation limited the role of cofradías in Europe, their existence was allowed to continue in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, where they were seen as means of social control of the African populations.28 Even though the African domestic slaves worked in the houses of the Europeans and carried out some of the most vital activities of human existence (like cooking and raising the children for the families), the slave society was, paradoxically, a space of racial segregation. Excluded from the confraternities of the Whites, the Blacks were allowed to organize and govern their own institutions that were a combination of mutual aid societies and social confraternities to plan communal feasts, dances, carnival processions, funerals, and to help members in need. Each cabildo usually had its own house and could raise its own funds for its activities. The Cuban Catholic Church sponsored religious cabildos for the purpose of
evangelization through the policy of “guided change,” which tolerated those African values that could be reinterpreted within Catholicism and radically opposed those that could not. Thus, one of the most celebrated street feasts among the Africans was the Día de Reyes, on January 6, which corresponds to the Catholic feast of Epiphany, the day which, according to the Book of Matthew in the Christian Bible, the three magoi (literally “magicians” in the original Greek, but
26 Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs.
27 Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Ibid., p. 26. 28 Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Ibid, p. 27
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subsequently translated as “wise men,” “kings,” or reyes in Spanish) “from the East,” guided by a star, came to visit baby Jesus and brought him three gifts from their homeland.29
In the 19th century, both the functions and the memberships of the cabildos began to change. They now included African-born slaves, Creole slaves, and free men and women of African descent. Thus, although the associations were encouraged by colonial authorities as a method of controlling slave beliefs and maintaining internal divisions among different ethnic groups (based, for instance, on possible resentments based on inter-group warfare back home in Africa), the cabildos helped to replace families and institutions that had been lost in slavery. They also created the space for the Africans to evolve their alternative religious systems. To borrow from the concepts generated by the linguist Noam Chomsky,30 a two-pronged structure developed at this time. The “surface structure” was made of the European, Christian façade, the Catholic saints (San Lázaro, Santa Bárbara, etc.), while in the “deep structure” lived the African, Yoruba pantheon made of the Orishas.
With the restrictions and interferences that the colonial administration placed in the affairs of the cabildos, especially after the official abolition of slavery in 1886, the
“underground” nature of the Africans’ existence became more vital. Catholic discourse was more strategically borrowed and reinterpreted in terms of African religions under the guise of an alternative form of folk Catholicism. The saints, Jesus Christ, and the Virgin Mary were identified with the African sovereigns (like the deity of metals, the deity of war, etc.) and the ancestors who, in return for sacrifices, would protect the Africans or assist them in their daily activities. These were, literally, “lived traditions.”
29 Matthew 2:1-12.
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Even though both Palo and Ocha/Santo/Lucumí are African-derived inspirations, today, they are literal espaces métissés, hybrid spaces, illustrations of the concept of zita. They are mixed and diverse in terms of race, color, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and even religion. It is not uncommon to meet people who, in themselves are living examples not only of religious syncretism, but of religious integration; women who are Catholic and santera, or men who are palero and santero, thus showing that these are indeed hybrid spaces.