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.

The spirituals are the bedrock of Black religion in North America, and in that sense they are otanes of African American tradition. These songs, like the sacred stones, are a way to cultivate the Spirit and give it housing. In their creation – improvised of callings and responses, of chants and catches, of mournings and praises – the new songs, as if new saints, became repositories of the communal and transformational power of African American people. Our aché. And in their singing, over the generations, the aché is renewed and made available to all who add their voices to the songs.

Historian, activist and composer Bernice Johnson Reagon¹³, founder of the women’s a capella group Sweet Honey in the Rock, talks about the traditional culture of the rural south as the “motherlode” of African American experience. It is the place where the strain is richest, where the pressed weight of suffering and resistance forced out brightness that has enriched and ennobled the entire nation. Reagon draws heavily in her academic, activist and cultural work from the congregational singing tradition of the Baptist churches she attended as a child in southwest Georgia. In an interview with the Veterans of Hope Project, Reagon talks about the role of singing in those southern churches in much the same language that Santeria devotees talk about the role of otanes:

The sacred stones, like the power to sing in the southern rural Black churches in which Reagon was raised, are not ritually available until one has undergone initiation. In the language of the church, “until you have been saved.” Their energy and blessing are, however, part of the atmosphere of the Santeria community and, in that sense, accessible to anyone. The otanes, once consecrated, represent the most essential part of a person’s being, the part shared with the orisha, with God. In Santeria, this essence is ritually fed with food offerings, water, songs, prayers, and the exercise of service to the larger community. Reagon’s reflection on the role of singing, as a “conditioning” and nurturing exercise for the soul, resonates strongly with the way otanes are fed. She also talks about the experience of church, and especially of singing the old style music, the spirituals, as effecting “the material you’re made of.” She says:

Reagon’s southwest Georgia community understood singing African American religious music as a way to feed and develop an important internal part of one’s nature. “The part of our being that is tampered with when you run this sound through your body is part of you that our culture thinks should be developed and cultivated, that you should be familiar with, that you should be able to get to as often as possible, and that if it is not developed, you are underdeveloped as a human being…If you go through your life and you don’t meet this part of yourself, somehow the culture has failed you.”¹⁶

For Reagon and her community of origin, singing spirituals, running the songs through your body, effects the “material you are made of” just as the energy of the orishas, running through the bodies of devotees affects the material they are made of. In Santeria and in Candomblé, (a tradition which also has a practice of consecrating the sacred energies of the universe in stones), the years of initiation and participation in ceremonial community create an experience parallel to that Reagon describes in rural Georgia churches. Cultivating connection to the orishas through music, ritual offerings, and service to others in need of spiritual and material assistance, is understood in those Afro-Atlantic traditions as an important way to develop one’s essence. For the southern African American Christian church, as Reagon describes it, singing the traditional music that has been the repository of so much grace and struggle, serves a very similar purpose.

In an essay on Deacon William Reardon, Sr., a master songleader and elder of Southern Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., Reagon writes of the prayer band and congregational singing traditions that kept alive “songs that brought us through times when only a song or a moan could wrap itself around us until change came.” Speaking of the deacon at his funeral service in 1997, Reagon said, “He was one who believed that we still needed what could only be reached through the experience of being in the middle of a singing congregation being bathed in the sounds of old spirituals and hymns.” As she explains in her text, in this passage Reagon is not talking about songs as music. Neither is she talking simply about songs as singing. “We are talking about what people believed you needed in order to be a whole human being.”¹⁷

V. Spirituals in the Development of African American Christianity