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Santeria originated in Cuba around 1517 among the slaves who were mostly from West Africa and who were followers of the Yoruba and Bantu religions. The African slaves were at first greatly distressed when they were told by their masters that they could no longer pay homage to the Orishas, their spiritual guardians, and that they would be severely punished if they did. But their resourceful and attentive priests quickly noticed a number of parallels between Yoruba religion and Catholicism. While appearing to pay obeisance and homage to various Christian saints, the Africans found that they could simply envision that they were praying to one of their own spirit beings. A secret religion was born—Regla de Ocha, “The Rule of the Orisha,” or the common and most popular name, Santeria, “the way of the saints.”

In Santeria, the supreme deity is referred to as Olorun or Olodumare, “the one who owns heaven.” The lesser guardians, the Orisha, were each associated with a different Roman Catholic saint: Babalz Ayi became St. Lazarus; Oggzn became St. Peter; Oshzn became Our Lady of Charity; Elegba became St. Anthony; Obatala became the Resurrected Christ, and so forth. Priests of the faith are called Santeros or Babalochas; priestesses are called Santeras or Lyalochas. The term Olorisha may be applied to either a priest or a priestess.

This sort of religious substitution was also practiced in Europe by followers of the Old Religion, the Witches, when the Pope and his clerical minions began to punish Witches who claimed to interact with their animal “familiars.” In those regions where the country folk and rural residents persisted in calling upon their familiars, the church decreed the spirit beings as demons sent by Satan to undermine the work of the clergy. All those accused of possessing a familiar or relying on it for guidance or assistance were forced to recant such a devilish partnership or be in danger of the torture chamber and the stake. In similar manner to the practitioners of Santeria, the Church actually provided saints and their symbols as acceptable substitutes for the ancient practice of asking favors or help from the witches’ familiar. Many of the saints of Christendom are identified by an animal symbol: for example, the dog with St. Bernard; the lion with St. Mark; the stag with St. Eustace; the crow with St. Anthony; and the much-loved St. Francis of Assisi was often represented symbolically by a wolf. Perhaps the most remarkable of all, the celebration of the fertility goddess Eostre (Ostare, Eustre) provided the Church with a ready-made festival that commemorated the resurrection of Christ, which was named Easter.

Although the rites of Santeria remain secret and hidden from outsiders, a few churches of that denomination have emerged which provide their members an opportunity to practice their faith freely. The Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye was formed in southern Florida in the early 1970s and won a landmark decision by the Supreme Court to be allowed to practice animal sacrifice. Each celebration usually begins with an invocation of Olorun, the supreme deity. Dancing to strong African rhythms continues until individuals are possessed by particular Orisha and allow the spirits to speak through them.

Possession in Haitian and New Orleans Vodou and Santeria is described as a god seizing a horse (the human being) who is ridden, sometimes to exhaustion. The allpowerful God is both distant and close, but too great to concern him/herself with humans, instead delegating the mediating task to the spirits (the lwa or loa). There are hundreds of lwa, who may be the protective spirits of clans or tribes from Africa or deified ancestors. Some are conceptualized in human form such as Papa Legba, the old man who guards gates and crossroads and is invoked at the beginning of every service. Others are less tangible like Gran Bwa, who is the spirit of the forest and trees. The lwa are grouped into families, called nations, which are divided by different rituals. Each ritual has distinctive ceremonies, dances, rhythms, and type of offering. The ritual is climaxed with the blood sacrifice, usually a chicken.

While Santeria’s rites are controversial in that they may include the sacrifice of small animals, it is essentially a benign religion, and it continues to grow among Hispanics in Florida, New York City, and Los Angeles. Some estimates state that there are over 300,000 practitioners of Santeria in New York alone. Although Santeria was suppressed in Cuba during the 1960s, lessening of restrictions upon religious practices in the 1990s saw its practitioners in that country increase in great numbers.

In April 1989, Santeria was dealt a negative blow to its public image that has been difficult to overcome. At that time, Mexican police officials raiding a drug ring based at Rancho Santa Elena outside of Matamoros discovered a large black cauldron in which a human brain, a turtle shell, a horseshoe, a human spinal column, and an assortment of human bones had been boiled in blood.

Further digging on the grounds of Rancho Santa Elena brought up a dozen human corpses which had all suffered ritual mutilations. When it was learned that the mother of Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo, the leader of the drug ring responsible for the murders, was a practitioner of Santeria, a media frenzy defining the religion as a mixture of Satanism, Voodoo, and demon-worship swept across Mexico and the United States.

Later, investigators would learn that Constanzo had created his own cruel concept of a cult by combining aspects of his own perverse cosmology with Santeria, Voodoo, and an ancient Aztec ritual known as santismo. Constanzo declared himself its High Priest and was joined in the performance of its gory rituals by Sara Maria Aldrete, who led a bizarre double life as a High Priestess and as an honor student at Texas Southmost College in Brownsville.

In June 2009, Bridgeport, Connecticut police conducted a drug raid and found five people suspected of the crimes of selling illegal drugs and firearms in a basement that was splattered with blood. Complaints had been received that ritual sacrifices were being conducted at the address, and from all the initially apparent evidence, the suspicions of those in the neighborhood had been confirmed. What appeared to be satanic writings were scribbled on the walls of the basement, and a beheaded chicken had been placed so its blood drained into a bowl.

From the amount of blood they discovered, the investigators were certain that many animals, probably mostly chickens, had been regularly sacrificed in the basement by practitioners of Santeria or some variant of a Voodoo religion. Then one of the officers spotted what appeared to be a skull. It had received a lot of rough use, but it appeared to be human.

On June 10, the medical examiner’s office made the official determination: it was a human skull that the officers had brought back from what had begun as a rather routine drug raid.

A disturbing mystery remained. Ten years earlier in Bridgeport, a headless body of an unidentified man had been found. Did the skull that the police found during the raid belong to the headless victim? And had the skull been used in sacrificial rituals ever since its decapitation?

The investigators could only speculate about the grim concept of human sacrifice in Bridgeport, but they had also heard that Santeria groups were growing in the area and they feared that some drug dealers had begun practicing the more grisly possibilities presented by the religion. It is unfortunate that, as in every form of religious expression, there are extremists. It is doubly unfortunate that sometimes those individuals who have contempt for the laws of the gods and of man revert to human sacrifice as a means of securing protection from those who would force them to cease their antisocial and criminal acts.

The ghede loa is a spirit of the dead who is commanded by the Voodoo Priest or Priestess (art by Ricardo Pustanio).