Santería (Lucumí)

To serve the orisha and keep one's destiny (ori) in order, to divine and cleanse, and to place a person under the protection of the orisha who owns them

Lucumí, usually called Santería in the United States, is the Cuban development of Yoruba religion, carried by enslaved Yoruba people and their descendants from the early nineteenth century and re-made in a Catholic colony that banned the religion and gave it the cover of the santoral. Each orisha is served by an initiate under a godparent, in a lineage with its own house (casa) and its own rules; the divination systems are Diloggún, read by initiated diviners with cowries, and Ifá, which is held by babalawos. The tradition has been documented by Cuban ethnographers since the early twentieth century and is now one of the large Afro-diasporic religions of the Americas.

Initiation is the centre: a person is seated with an orisha and becomes that orisha's child, in a costly, closed rite that obliges them for life and places them under a godparent's authority. The orisha are kept as consecrated stones in vessels, fed and cared for, and consulted before anything of consequence. Outside initiation, clients receive cleansings (despojo, ebó), herbal baths (omiero), and offerings under a santero's direction, and the diviner's reading determines what is to be done.

The core of Lucumí is closed. Initiation, the consecration and handling of the orisha's stones, the recipes of omiero, and the interpretation of the odu belong to initiates and to their lineages, and the tradition's own authorities say so; the material is not public knowledge that a catalogue may reproduce. There is also a real argument inside the tradition about the commercialisation of initiation in the United States and about non-initiates publishing 'how to' books, and the corpus records the argument rather than settling it.