draw a hard-and-fast line between either the
human and the divine or the living and the Dead.
Because Santeria is primarily concerned with the
self and with achieving ritual mastery of the nat-
ural, social, and spiritual forces affecting daily life,
the religious attitude of priests and devotees might
best be described as instrumental—that is, “If it
works for you, believe it.” Despite Santeria’s his-
tory of religious persecution, Santeria priests and
devotees are generally tolerant of other religions.
Many regard themselves as Catholics, whereas oth-
ers fluidly slip among the worlds of the Catholic
mass, the spiritists’ white table, and Santeria drum
dance with little deliberation or anxiety.
WorshipSanteria is not congregational and so does not
depend on the existence of a temple or church
building. Worship is both individual and commu-
nal. Lay devotees carry out a round of private
offerings to the santos in their homes; priests and
priestesses perform rituals and provide herbal
medicine, counseling, and symbolic healing to
devotees and the general public. There is also a
cycle of annual festivals coordinated with the
saints’ feast days of Cuba’s Catholic church.
Most individual worship takes place in front of
the altars that devotees keep in their homes or
outside in natural settings such as a riverside, near
the sea, or in a forest or park. Much individual
worship consists of offerings to the orisha and
the Dead. These offerings generally have two pur-
poses: The first is to allow the devotee to influence
the orisha and gain access to its aché to help solve
personal problems. The second purpose is to help
the devotee develop a bond of reciprocity and
mutual respect with the orisha, a bond thought to
be beneficial not only for the human devotee, but
for the orisha as well. Offerings can take many
forms, including cooked or raw food, liquor,
money, cloth, prayers, or entire ceremonies, as
well as the blood of sacrificed animals.
Communal worship is highly participatory and
features ritual dance; call-and-response chants
performed in Yoruba and accompanied by drums;
ceremonial spirit possession; ancestor veneration;
and, on occasion, animal sacrifices. The most char-
acteristic form of communal worship in Santeria is
thebembeortoque de santo. Bembes are great
feasts and celebrations often correlated with the
feast days of those Catholic saints who have
orisha associated with them or coincident with the
initiation of a priest or priestess, the anniversary
of a priest’s initiation, or the fulfillment of some
other religious obligation to the orisha a priestess
may have.
Spirit mediumship is at the core of the bembe,
so these ceremonies usually fall into two parts: the
invocation of the ancestral Dead and the orisha,
and the presence of the orisha among their devo-
tees. The invocations are libations and prayers
made before an orisha altar in Lucumi, the Cuban
variant of the Yoruba language that is the litur-
gical tongue for all religious observances in
Santeria, followed by music directed at the altar
by an ensemble of drummers who lead call-and-
response chants sung with a motionless group of
standing devotees. In the second part of the cere-
mony, devotees perform dances imitating the per-
sonalities, attributes, and attitudes of the each of
the orisha as their chants are sung in an attempt to
attract the orisha, to compel them to come and
take over the bodies of their priests and priest-
esses, and manifest themselves in a visible human
form. When this event occurs, the possessed
priests and priestesses are garbed in the colors
and clothing appropriate to the orisha who has
mounted them and they interact with the commu-
nity of believers: talking to them, confronting
them, consoling them, healing them, making
prophecies, or recommending that they carry out
certain rituals. Eventually the orisha return to
their invisible realm, leaving behind a group of
exhausted priests who have no memory of what
their bodies did while orisha possessed them. A
purification rite ends this part of the ceremony, a
communal meal follows, and then a general distri-
bution of the fruits and desserts that have sur-
rounded the altar throughout the events.Diffusion of Santeria
The spread of Santeria outside of Cuba mainly
owes its origins to Cuban exiles who left in 1959
and also those who were part of the exodus from
the port of Mariel in 1980. They brought Santeria
to the United States, where it spread to other
Latino communities and to African American,
white, and Asian communities as well. From these592 Santeria