Espiritismo

Espiritismo came to the Spanish Caribbean as the nineteenth-century French and Spanish Spiritualist current - Allan Kardec's codification, read by liberal creoles as a modern and scientific religion - and was re-made there into a practice centred on the dead: a table (mesa) with a glass of water and a candle, and the guides who speak through a medium. In Puerto Rico and Cuba it merged with Catholic devotion and with African-derived practice into the forms called espiritismo criollo, and in the diaspora it is commonly worked in the same household as Santería or Palo, by the same person or the same family.

The central act is the velación or misa: a gathering around a table where a medium develops the spirits present, delivers messages from the dead, and diagnoses the living. Cleansing is done with baths, perfumes, smoke and prayers; the dead receive water, coffee, tobacco and flowers; and the spirits are classified - protectors, guides, and the difficult muertos who must be worked with carefully. A person may be told to set a table of their own, which is how the practice spreads through families.

Espiritismo is a religion of the dead with its own ethics, and its central rule is that a medium serves the spirits and does not command them: a misa is not a performance, a guide is not a servant, and the dead are not tools. Development is supervised by an experienced medium and by the congregation's judgement, and a person who opens a table without that supervision is understood to be in danger. Its material is sold openly in botánicas; its practice is not thereby public property.