Santeria and New Age: Interactions, Limits and Complementarities

chapter 8 Santeria and New Age: Interactions, Limits and Complementarities

Nahayeilli B. Juárez Huet

Introduction

Santeria,1 like other Afro-American religions, began with the transatlantic traf- ficking of African slaves that went on for nearly four hundred years from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth. According to Roger Bastide (1971), these religions emerged in guilds (cabildos) and lay brotherhoods (cofradías), mutu- alistic associations organized under Catholic patronage and established in each city by Africans and African descendants with the same ethnic background. Ultimately, it was in these spaces that distinct varieties of Afro-American religions were born, and their individual particularities became much more promi- nent in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Santeria began in Cuba and is considered to have a Yoruba base,2 although in the course of its formation it also incorporated elements of Kardecist Spiritism, a set of beliefs that was most influential in the nineteenth century. Santeria also took up elements from other cults of African origin3 and spread widely in the American continent after the Cuban Revolution (1959). From the outset, it was a ‘racialized’ religion, in that it was characteristically associated with African people and people of Afro descent, although Santeria broke away from such ‘ethnic borders’ quite early on (cf. Argyriadis and Juárez Huet, 2007). Furthermore, until just before the Cuban Revolution, Afro-Cuban cults were regarded in Cuba as ‘witchcraft’ and were associated with a ‘primitive intelli- gence’, supposedly a vestige of African heritage. This idea is exemplified in the first works of Fernando Ortiz—the father of Afro-Cuban studies—who ana- lyzed these cultural expressions under the influence of the positivism and

1 Leaving aside discussions of terminology, I use the word Santeria in this text to refer to the set of complementary modalities that it consisted of originally (Spiritism, Catholicism, Palo Monte, worship of Ifá). Argyriadis notes that in Cuba this complementarity is called La Religión (1999). 2 Category applied to an ethno-linguistic group in West Africa, living mainly in Nigeria and Benin. 3 Principally Bantu and Arara.

Santeria and New Age 179 social Darwinism fashionable at the time, from the point of view of criminol- ogy (Menéndez, 2002; Hagedorn, 2001: 174). Ortiz considered the ‘black race’ to be harmful for Cuban society, arguing this race had transmitted its ‘superstitions, its organizations, its languages and its dances’ to the Cuban population at large (Ortiz, 2000: 5). Thus, at the start of the twentieth century ‘every trace of Africanism, especially to do with magical-religious practices, was mercilessly attacked’ (Argyriadis, 2000: 651), and indeed, various campaigns against these so-called atavisms had led to legislation, as early as during the colonial period, suppress- ing all music of ‘Afro’ origin (Moore, 2001–2002: 178). It was only more recently that African heritage was ‘legitimized and re-valued’ as part of Cuban miscege- nation and Cuban culture, thanks to the 1920s Afro-Cuban movement and the influence of European intellectuals and artists who made ‘black’ and ‘primitive’ art fashionable (Brandon, 1993; Menéndez, 2002; Agyriadis, 2006). ‘Appreciation’ of Santeria’s aesthetic aspects, especially its music and dance, has persisted, and since the 1990s, Cuba’s tourist industry has heavily promoted Santeria, and it is now a very popular emblem of Afro-Cuban culture (Hagedorn, 2001: 8, 221; Knauer, 2001: 23). But the legitimacy that Santeria enjoys today in Cuba does not transfer to new contexts (see Frigerio, 2004: 41–42), something that has also occurred with other Afro-American religions (such as Voodoo, Candomblé, Umbanda and others). While Santeria has existed in Mexico, at least in part, since the late nineteenth century,4 it still lacks a positive social status. Santeria in Mexico does not represent, nor does it claim to represent, the legacy of a longstanding Afro-descended population. Instead, as is the case in many countries outside Cuba, Santeria is a contemporary phenomenon. Furthermore, while Mexican Santeros rarely identify themselves as descendants of Africans, some of them like to call themselves ‘Yorubas’. In this sense, the identity is not ethnic, but more of a ‘spiritual’ identity anchored in lineages tied together by religious initiations. Although the practice of Santeria is indeed contemporary, it has flourished in Mexico largely thanks to what J. Galinier calls a ‘cultural substratum’ (see his chapter in this book) that includes non-Spanish, non-indigenous elements. African and Afro-American practices and beliefs were energized in part by the campaigns against superstitions, the extirpation of idolatries, and inquisitorial witch hunts and prosecutions (Quezada, 1989; Solís, 2005). But Afro-American religions also formed in spaces of negotiation, dialog and complementarity,

4 For the case of Guadalajara see Esparza, 2002; 2003. For the case of Veracruz see Argyriadis and Juárez Huet 2006; 2008, and for the case of Mexico City, see Juárez Huet, 2007, 2009; González Torres, 2008.