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Afro-Cuban religions - especially the practice of santeria, based on West African traditions - are an essential aspect of contemporary Cuban identity, Christine Ayorinde argues, and their existence has forced the current revolutionary state into bizarre and contradictory positions. Ayorinde's bold assertion confounds official pronouncements about the irrelevance of religion in a modern socialist state. The revolutionary leadership has acknowledged the centrality of Cuba's African heritage, while upholding the idea of a nationhood that transcends racial difference. Ayorinde proposes that the conflict between the desire to recognize the country's African roots and the offical commitment to a secular state has created a complex, often paradoxical situation. Despite an ideological campaign to create a new, rational society, African-derived religions are emerging today for the first time from a position of marginality. Cuba now is beset with a sense of disorientation as well as a return to old habits and patterns, including racial inequality. Based mostly inside Cuba, Ayorinde's research includes interviews and conversations with individual Cubans, including practitioners of Afro-Cuban religions from different ethnic backgrounds. Ayorinde also interviewed both religious and atheist commentators on Afro-Cuban religions and culture, including academics, journalists, party officials, and members of governmental and nongovernmental institutions, many at the forefront of efforts to give santeria greater recognition as a central component of the national culture. In addition, the book offers a fresh historical overview of changing religious forms and attitudes in Cuba, examining the encounter with European culture and the Roman Catholic Church, religious practice among slaves in the 19th century, the concept of racial fraternity articulated by Cuban patriot Jose Marti, and the witchcraft scares of the early decades of the 20th century, when religious practices were associated with criminality. Its emphasis on the period since 1959 and on the current decade places it on the cutting edge of studies that examine contemporary Cuban culture.
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• Author's NotePreface: DespedidasAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Transnational Santer a Assemblage
• s1. Electric Orich
• a2. Transnational Camino
• s3. Pacts with Darknes
• s4. Scent of Empir
• e5. Contaminating FemininitiesEpilogue: A Death at DawnGlossaryNotesReferencesIndex.
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Santer a is an African-inspired, Cuban diaspora religion long stigmatized as witchcraft and often dismissed as superstition, yet its spirit- and possession-based practices are rapidly winning adherents across the world. Aisha M. Beliso-De Jes s introduces the term "copresence" to capture the current transnational experience of Santer a, in which racialized and gendered spirits, deities, priests, and religious travelers remake local, national, and political boundaries and reconfigure notions of technology and transnationalism. Drawing on eight years of ethnographic research in Havana and Matanzas, Cuba, and in New York City, Miami, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay area, Beliso-De Jes s traces the phenomenon of copresence in the lives of Santer a practitioners, mapping its emergence in transnational places and historical moments and its ritual negotiation of race, imperialism, gender, sexuality, and religious travel. Santer a's spirits, deities, and practitioners allow digital technologies to be used in new ways, inciting unique encounters through video and other media. Doing away with traditional perceptions of Santer a as a static, localized practice or as part of a mythologized "past, " this book emphasizes the religion's dynamic circulations and calls for nontranscendental understandings of religious transnationalisms.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• History of the tradition
• Cosmology
• The Orisha and their mythology
• Destiny, divination, and sacrifice
• Life, death, and the afterlife
• Religious rituals
• Initiation rituals
• The religious family
• Orisha religion today and tomorrow.

Santeria, also known as Yoruba, Lukumi, or Orisha, was originally brought to the Americas from Africa by enslaved peoples destined for the Caribbean and South America; by the late 1980s it was estimated that more than 70 million African and American people participate in, or were familiar with, the various forms of Santeria, including traditional religions in Africa, Vodun in Haiti, Candomble in Brazil, Shango religion in Trinidad, Santeria in Cuba and, of course, variants of all of these in the U.S. Today, there are practitioners around the world including Europe and Asia. Yet, because of the secretive nature of the religion, it is difficult to get accurate and objective information. The author introduces readers to the religion, explores the basic elements, including the Orisha, and answers the many questions that Santeria arouses in observers and practitioners alike. Santeria was brought to the United States by Cuban exiles in the early 1960s after the Cuban Revolution. Since then it has spread to the larger Hispanic community, to the African American community, and to other groups as well. Today practitioners can be found in every state, and interest in Orisha and related traditions has gained popularity. As the number of practitioners has grown so has public awareness. In this compelling introduction, the author answers such questions as where: Did this religion come from? What do santeros believe? Is it a cult? What takes place at a ritual event? What do santeros believe regarding death and the afterlife? Is there ritual sacrifice? The author, a practitioner as well as a scholar of the faith, dispels the myths that surround this religious practice, and brings readers to a better understanding of this growing faith.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

While much theological thinking assumes a normative male perspective, this study demonstrates how our ideas of religious beliefs and practices change in the light of gender awareness. Exploring the philosophy and practices of the Orisha traditions (principally the Afro-Cuban religious complex known as Santeria) as they have developed in the Americas, Clark suggests that, unlike many mainstream religions, these traditions exist within a female-normative system in which all practitioners are expected to take up female gender roles. Examining the practices of divination, initiation, possession trance, sacrifice, and witchcraft in successive chapters, Clark explores the ways in which Santeria beliefs and practices deviate from the historical assumptions about and the conceptual implications of these basic concepts. After tracing the standard definition of each term and describing its place within the worldview of Santeria, Clark teases out its gender implications to argue for the female-normative nature of the religion. By arguing that gender is a fluid concept within Santeria, Clark suggests that the qualities of being female form the ideal of Santeria religious practice for both men and women. In addition, she asserts that the Ifa cult organized around the male-only priesthood of the babalawo is an independent tradition that has been incompletely assimilated into the larger Santeria complex. Based on field research done in several Santeria communities, Clark's study provides a detailed overview of the Santeria and Yoruba traditional beliefs and practices.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Santería's development and structure
• Santería's transformations: the introduction to the Pantheon
• Santería's moral dimensions, worldview assumptions, and logico-structural integration: new ways and current trends.

Cros Sandoval's authoritative introduction to the Afro-Cuban religion called Santeria explores how it emerged and developed in Cuba out of transplanted Yoruba beliefs and continues to spread and adjust to changing times and contexts. Systematically exploring every facet of Santeria's worldview, Sandoval examines how practitioners have adapted received beliefs and practices to reconcile them with new environments, from plantation slavery to exile in the United States. Offering a distinctive perspective based on a lifetime of extensive research and firsthand knowledge, Cros Sandoval illuminates Santeria as a theological system and as a vital, continuously evolving community. The adaptation process that gave birth to Santeria was not the singular result of cultural resistance, she argues, but a successful attempt to find meaning linked to alien religious elements in a way that appealed to a diverse following. Beginning with the transatlantic history of how Yoruba traditions came to Cuba and were established and adapted to Cuban society, Sandoval provides a comprehensive comparison of Yoruba and Cuban mythologies, followed by an overview of how Santeria has continued to diffuse and change in response to new contexts and adherents - with an especially illuminating perspective on Santeria among Cubans in Miami. As a reference work and historical treatment of Santeria, Sandoval's work will appeal to both scholars and nonscholars alike.
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Miguel is Cuban American, with the accent on American. But beneath the surface of his sun-drenched Miami lifestyle lurks an evil that threatens to destroy him. The chance reading of a newspaper article reporting a stolen skull and the ritualistic murder of a petty drug dealer pitches Miguel into battle with an underworld dominated by santeria in this spell-binding and engrossing novel.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Spirits at the crossroads of belief and pragmatism
• Spiritism and the place of the dead in Afro-Cuban religion
• On good mediumship: science, revolution, and legitimacy
• Encounter, selfhood, and multiplicity
• Development as cosmogony: ritual and materialization
• Epilogue: biographical intersections.

Despite its powerful influence on Cuban culture, Espiritismo has often been overlooked by scholars. Developing the Dead is the first in-depth exploration of contemporary Espiritismo in Cuba. Based on extensive fieldwork among religious practitioners and their clients in Havana, this book makes the surprising claim that Spiritist practices are fundamentally a project of developing the self. When mediums cultivate relationships between the living and the dead, argues Diana Espirito Santo, they develop, learn, sense, dream, and connect to multiple spirits (muertos), expanding the borders of the self. This understanding of selfhood is radically different fromEnlightenment ideas of an autonomous, bounded self and holds fascinating implications for prophecy, healing, and self-consciousness. Developing the Dead shows how Espiritismo's self-making process permeates all aspects of life, not only for its own practitioners but also for those of other Afro-Cuban religions.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

The secrets of Santeria, Voodoo and Obeah are among the oldest enigmas in the world. Their roots go back to pre-historic Africa - perhaps even beyond that. From the 16th century onwards, the slave trade brought these ancient mysteries to the West, where they blended strangely with traditional Christianity: the ancient African gods became identified with legendary saints. This integration of the two faiths slowly evolved to form the many varieties of Santeria, Obeah and Voudoun that are widely practised throughout the world today. Their characteristic dancing and drumming seem able to invoke strange states of mind in which almost anything is possible.Even stories of zombies - the walking dead - still persist. Is there a rational explanation for them? Contemporary Voudoun priests, priestesses, magicians and enchanters use rare herbs and spices as well as charms, dolls and talismans to control the natural world in ways that science cannot always explain. Accounts of their inexplicable successes are examined in depth. Most intriguing of all are the claims that are made for their love philtres and aphrodisiacs. What powers do these old religions still possess?
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Creolization-the coming together of diverse beliefs and practices to form new beliefs and practices-is one of the most significant phenomena in Caribbean religious history. Brought together in the crucible of the sugar plantation, Caribbean peoples drew on the variants of Christianity brought by European colonizers, as well as on African religious and healing traditions and the remnants of Amerindian practices, to fashion new systems of belief. Creole Religions of the Caribbean offers a comprehensive introduction to the syncretic religions that have developed in the region. From Vodou, Santeria, Regla de Palo, the Abakua Secret Society, and Obeah to Quimbois and Espiritismo, the volume traces the historical-cultural origins of the major Creole religions, as well as the newer traditions such as Pocomania and Rastafarianism. This second edition updates the scholarship on the religions themselves and also expands the regional considerations of the Diaspora to the U. S. Latino community who are influenced by Creole spiritual practices. Fernandez Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert also take into account the increased significance of material culture-art, music, literature-and healing practices influenced by Creole religions.
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• Las tres mujeres de Orula
• Los refranes de Ifà
• Las historias de Ifà y algunas transculturaciones
• Historias de Orula.

• I bow my head to the ground : Santeria thrones and rituals
• Ver para creer (seeing is believing) : the Prendas and ritual of Palo Monte
• It's my war now : the private sphere of Santiago's daily practice
• I am not from here : espiritismo and the congo spirits of the dead
• Afterword: ¿Y la otra? (and the other one?) : the nature of our collaboration.

In the summer of 2000, two award-winning photographers, Claire Garoutte and Anneke Wambaugh, were in Santiago de Cuba, a city on the southeastern coast of Cuba. A chance encounter led them to the home of Santiago Castaneda Vera, a priest-practitioner of Santeria and Palo Monte. Out of that initial meeting, a unique collaboration developed. Santiago opened his home and religious practice to Garoutte and Wambaugh, who returned to his house many times over the next five years, cameras in hand. The result is "Crossing the Water", an extraordinary visual record of Afro-Cuban religious experience. A book of 157 striking photographs, many of which are in colour, "Crossing the Water" includes images of elaborate Santeria altars and Palo spirit cauldrons, as well as of Santiago and his godchildren, members of his large religious 'family', engaged in ritual practices: spirit possession, the feeding of the spirits, and private and collective healing ceremonies.As the head of a religious community, Santiago helps his godchildren with contentious relationships, physical ailments, emotional crises, and the hardships of poverty. He combines different traditions to achieve healing and harmony: not only Santeria and Palo Monte but also Espiritismo, a Cuban version of nineteenth-century European Spiritism. For Santiago and his followers, the three religions together form a coherent theological whole. Santiago eventually became Garoutte's and Wambaugh's godfather and spiritual leader, and "Crossing the Water" is informed by their experiences as practitioners of Santeria and Palo Monte. Their text provides clear explanations of the objects and practices depicted in the images. Describing the power and meaning of human-spirit interactions, and the sights, sounds, scents, motions, and sensations of many ritual practices, "Crossing the Water" takes readers deep inside the intimate world of Afro-Cuban spirituality.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

An African exhibit at the museum draws Raymond deeper and deeper into a mystical and powerful religion based on the beliefs of the Yoruba people of Africa.

When the Yorubas of West Africa were brought to Cuba as slaves, they preserved their heritage by worshiping secretly. The resulting religion, Santeria, is controversial for its ceremonies including animal sacrifice. This book clears many misunderstandings held by those outside the Santeria community. 75 photos.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Patakís from the composites of Okana
• Patakís from the composites of Eji Oko
• Patakís from the composites of Ogundá
• Patakís from the composites of Irosun
• Patakís from the composites of Oché
• Patakís from the composites of Obara
• Patakís from the composites of Odí
• Patakís from the composites of Unle
• Patakís from the composites of Osá
• Patakís from the composites of Ofún
• Patakís from the composites of Owani
• Patakís from the composites of Ejila Shebora

Since ancient times the Yoruba of West Africa created sacred stories - patakís - to make sense of the world around them. Upon arrival in the New World, the Yoruba religion began to incorporate elements from Catholic and Native traditions, evolving into Santería and new patakís were born, adding to the many chapters already found in the odu of the diloggún - the sacred oral teachings and divination system of the Yoruba, or Lucumí, faith. Comparable to the myths of ancient Greece and Rome and rich with jewels of wisdom like the I Ching, these Santería stories are as vast as the Hindu Vedas and as culturally significant as the parables in the Torah, Talmud and Christian Bible. DILOGGÚN TALES OF THE NATURAL WORLD presents more than 40 patakís that shed light upon the worldview of Santería. Each story in this collection, reassembled from the oral tradition of the African diaspora, is centred on a spiritual principle in nature: the waxing and waning of the moon, solar and lunar eclipses, the phenomenon of shooting stars, the separation of sky and earth and the origins of the animals and birds who play key roles in Santería symbology. Revealing the metaphysics, theology and philosophy of the Yoruba people, this volume shows these stories to be as powerful and relevant today as they were to the ancient Yoruba who once safeguarded them. Includes more than 40 myths, stories and histories from the Lucumí tradition Reassembles the oral fragments from the African diaspora into coherent stories Demonstrates that the African peoples, specifically the Yoruba, had deep philosophies and metaphysics involving nature and the natural world

Santeria represents the first in-depth, scholarly account of a profound way of wisdom that is growing in importance in America today. A professional academic and himself a participant in the Santeria community of the Bronx for several years, Joseph Murphy offers a powerful description and insightful analysis of this African/Cuban religion. He traces the survival of an ancient spiritual path from its West African Yoruba origins, through nearly two centuries of slavery in the New World, to its presence in the urban centers of the United States, where it continues to inspire seekers with its compelling vision

• Part I. Ordinary home cooking
• Part II. Kitchen work
• Part III. Kitchen talk
• Conclusion.

Honorable Mention, 2019 Barbara T. Christian Literary Award, given by the Caribbean Studies Association Winner, 2017 Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion, presented by the Society for the Anthropology of Religion section of the American Anthropological Association Finalist, 2017 Albert J. Raboteau Prize for the Best Book in Africana Religions presented by the Journal of Africana Religions An examination of the religious importance of food among Caribbean and Latin American communities Before honey can be offered to the Afro-Cuban deity Ochun, it must be tasted, to prove to her that it is good. In African-inspired religions throughout the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States, such gestures instill the attitudes that turn participants into practitioners. Acquiring deep knowledge of the diets of the gods and ancestors constructs adherents' identities; to learn to fix the gods' favorite dishes is to be "seasoned" into their service. In this innovative work, Elizabeth Perez reveals how seemingly trivial "micropractices" such as the preparation of sacred foods, are complex rituals in their own right. Drawing on years of ethnographic research in Chicago among practitioners of Lucumi, the transnational tradition popularly known as Santeria, Perez focuses on the behind-the-scenes work of the primarily women and gay men responsible for feeding the gods. She reveals how cooking and talking around the kitchen table have played vital socializing roles in Black Atlantic religions. Entering the world of divine desires and the varied flavors that speak to them, this volume takes a fresh approach to the anthropology of religion. Its richly textured portrait of a predominantly African-American Lucumi community reconceptualizes race, gender, sexuality, and affect in the formation of religious identity, proposing that every religion coalesces and sustains itself through its own secret recipe of micropractices.
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As the subtitle indicates, this study focuses on Puerto Rican Spiritism, that mixture of spiritualism and the teachings of Allan Kardec that swept Latin America inspite of the Roman Catholic church's strong opposition. Dr Perez y Mena traces the movement's historical growth, then investigates its function today, how it differs from similar practices, such as the Cuban "Santeria", its practices and promises, and how the congregation participates. The roles of Godchild ("Ahijado"), the Godfather ("Padrino"), the public ("El Publica") and the associates ("Los Asociados") in the "centro espiritista" are described as well as the fulfilling role of Afro-Latin cultural beliefs generally among latinos in the United States.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

After three years of investigation and interviewing priests, sellers of medicinal plants, and spiritual masters, the author describes the world of Santería, including the rituals of the gods, traditional healing, and related practices.