Over the course of their presence in the Americas, people of African descent have developed an amazing array of religious traditions in places as disparate as Uruguay, Peru, Mexico, Trinidad and Guyana. Among the most widely practiced of the Afro-Atlantic religions are Cuban Santeria (also known as Lucumí, or Regla Ocha), Brazilian Candomblé, and Haitian Vodou. While there is tremendous variety within and among these practices there are also a number of essential elements that are shared in greater or lesser measure by them all. Like the ring shout, each of these three traditions is characterized by ritualized, collective music and dance rhythms – the primary means by which, on the continent and in the African diaspora, the sacred is honored and called into the human community. In these sister traditions, the circle dance is central to the experience of community and to the experience of worship. Long’s and Stuckey’s observations about the “binding” nature of the circle in the religion of Blacks in North America are strongly echoed in the experience of Candomblé in Brazil, for example, where the roda (sacred danced ring) is the means by which divinities from many different African ethnic communities are ritually called into communion – with each other and with their exiled generations.
Another characteristic shared among many Afro-Atlantic religions is a marked intimacy with spirit; a great sense of close, even familial relationship with divinity. The phenomenon of manifesting the spiritual energy of the deity in one’s body, ( “possession”), is evidence of the exceptional intimacy between humans and Spirit that characterizes most religions of the Afro-Atlantic diaspora.
The sacred spirits of Africa, in the Americas, are known by various names: Orishas, lwas, voduns, wintis, nkisis, among others.7 These terms have roots in one or more of the languages of West and Central Africa, but have essentially similar meanings – divinities; the divine presence in nature; manifestations of God; protective spiritual energies. Orisha, a Yoruba word, is probably the most popular single idiom due to the extraordinary visibility and prevalence of Yoruba influences in the New World.8 There exist hundreds of specific orishas within the pantheons of traditional practice in Nigeria, Benin, Togo, Cuba, Brazil, and Trinidad.
For example, Shango is the orisha of fire, the sacred manifestation of the energy of flame. He is also associated with thunder and lightning, justice, mountains, friendship, self-confidence and virility. He was said to have been a king of the Yoruba Oyo kingdom in ancient times and to have become a deity after death. Oyá is a warrior energy, a favorite wife of Shango and his partner in storm-making and battle. She is a strongly independent female energy who rules transformative change, and is represented in great winds and whirlwinds (hurricanes, tornados) that are capable of radically altering everything in their path. Like Shango, Oyá has a fiery temperament but can also represent the ardor of good friendship. Nanã Burukû is one of the oldest of all the orisha energies – an ancient creative force associated with still, muddy waters, like swamps. She represents a quiet, deeply placed wisdom and is as much associated with death as with life. In some of her myths, Nanã is said to be “older than God.”
The orishas, and the African and Afro-Atlantic deities of other names, represent an extraordinarily rich body of creative wisdom about the nature of the world and connections among all life in the universe. Within these religions, human beings are cared for and guided by protective spirits to whom individuals and families offer a reciprocal respect and honor. The relationship is a mutual one in which the orishas are venerated and cultivated with special foods, songs, dances, gifts and the ongoing energy and attention of devotees. The people, in turn, are assured of help and the constant accompaniment of their deities through the large and small vicissitudes of life.
7 The divinities are called orishas in the Yoruba-based traditions of Santeria and Candomblé (albeit with different spellings in each); lwas in Vodou; voduns in Dahomean Candomblé traditions; wintis in the Surinamese religion of the same name; and nkisis in Cuban tradition of Kongo-Angola origin known as Palo as well as in the Kongo-Angolan lineages of Brazilian Candomblé. See section IV “Otanes” for more information on African origins.
8 The pervasiveness of Yoruba traditions in contemporary Afro-Atlantic life is a function not only of the strength of those particular West African practices but also of the history of nineteenth century slavery and the large presence of Yoruba-speaking peoples among the last waves of Africans enslaved in the New World. “Factories” along the coastline of Central and South West Africa were among the earliest and longest-continuing sources of enslaved people sent to many parts of the Americas. Thus Bantu-Kongo traditions laid important foundations of Afro-Atlantic culture which often formed creative continuities with later-arriving West African practices. See Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy, New York: Random House, 1983. For example, Candomblé is a word with roots in Kikongo and other Bantu-based Central African languages, and there is a Kongo-Angola lineage (roughly equivalent to a “denomination”) in the Candomblé tradition that cultivates Central African nkisis and uses a Bantu-based liturgical language. Nonetheless, the Yoruba lineage in the tradition is the best-known and has come to symbolize all the others in popular representations of the religion.
III. “Tones to Shake the Soul”: The Transformational Power of the Spirituals