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Review of Santeria Stories (2006) and Santeria: A Practical Guide to Afro-Caribbean 
Magic (1992), by Luis Manuel Núñez, Spring Publications, Woodstock CT. 
 
 Luis Manuel Núñez’s Santeria Stories offers twenty pages of information about 
Santeria deities and some instructions on divination and offerings, but is largely a 
retelling of oral stories gleaned from “many followers of the religion” (2006, 393-394). It 
is not a scholarly work per se; it uses no citations and offers a truncated bibliography of 
four authors. But neither is it folkloric in Lydia Cabrera’s sense of reporting fieldwork; 
Núñez takes the literary liberties of storyteller. His earlier Santeria: A Practical Guide to 
Afro-Caribbean Magic is a “how-to” book that utilizes the work of four additional 
authors. They therefore raise interesting questions about the relationship between orality 
and scholarship. Read together, they bookend a troubled syncretic site where racialized, 
sexualized perceptions of a controversial Diaspora religion meet up with would-be 
practitioners who seek quick-fixes and thrills rather than guidance from elders. 
The name “Santeria” denotes a group of religions, originally developed by West 
Africans enslaved in Cuba, which has spread as many variant branches throughout the 
world. The travails of slavery and continued migration help account for diverse theology 
and praxes. With familial similarities derived from Yoruba indigenous religion, divergent 
branches began with, and tend to be more or less rooted in the need for “survival by way 
of resistance to a dominant culture” (de la Torre, 2001, 845). Questions appropriate to 
books about this cluster of religions therefore include “in what ways is the work 
grounded in the history of slavery and accompanying dominant belief systems, in 
scholarship about and/or experience of Yoruba philosophy and the development of 
diverse Diaspora beliefs and praxes? What registrations of which shifts and resistance 
does it analyze or reference? Where is it coming from, and who is it written for?” 
Michael Ventura provides a well researched five page “Introduction” to A 
Practical Guide that offers minimal context. According to Ventura it is written for “you 
and I,” not to encourage us to “start killing chickens” but to “remind us that [in Yoruba] 
the sacred is” neither “dead” nor predicated on the “Cartesian mind-body split.” He also 
argues that the Yoruba concept of sacrifice is a necessary challenge to “an economics … 
which rewards selfishness” and offers remedy to sacrifice of “the very ecology of the 
planet,” of the “sacrifice of huge segments of the population to poverty” (1992, viii, vi, 
ix). This promising beginning is followed by a four pages of “Historical Notes” in which 
Núñez provides his sense of context, and also invites us all: “neither skin color nor 
language is a barrier” (1992, 1). This book, then, is ostensibly written for everyone. But 
Núñez never delivers the remedy that Ventura promises. Instead he describes a religion of 
“throbbing” drums and adds his own promise to tell us about “blood, and sex” (1992, 1). 
This he delivers in abundance in Stories. 
Stories begins with two pages explaining that Yoruba religion and Cuban 
Catholic-endorsed mutual aid societies converged as Santeria, while A Practical Guide 
encapsulates Núñez’s sense of the intimate side of history: “nannies croon African 
Apatakis. White babies fall asleep, the stories of the gods in their ears. The babies grow 
up. … They believe … white men have black lovers. Beautiful black women bite their 
ears. They learn to respect Chango” (1992, 4). These kinds of problematic tropes of 
African women as seminal mothers and as fiercely seductive lovers have been 
exhaustively chronicled, for example in books such as Janell Hobson’s Venus in the Dark 
(2005). In this too familiar vein, according to Núñez’s version of Santeria, Africa has 
been seductively transmitted to Spaniards in the most intimate settings, and, like Joe in 
Sankofa, is born as their conflicted child. The rest of A Practical Guide is concerned with 
the specific praxes of a particular branch of Santeria, while Stories delivers an oral 
literature that is, in a sense, Joe’s version of his parents. The conversion of exploitation 
and rape to a romanticized union in which the master respects the god of, but not the 
body of, the slave – and one may well ask, what kind of “respect” is a master capable of? 
– the displacement of the body of believer as Black female by white male – shifts the 
original set of critical questions to a different set of queries. 
The main question becomes “how does Núñez’s version of Santeria register what 
shifts and signs of struggle with which dominant schemata”? He characterizes the 
practitioner as “a devout Roman Catholic at the same time as he is sacrificing a rooster to 
a cement image of Elegua enthroned behind the front door” (1992, 3). This and rape 
reveal exactly which dominant schema, inflicted by whom, activated the shifts. 
Understanding what has shifted, however, requires more information about the 
“sophisticated culture” of the Yoruba than Núñez provides in mere paragraphs (2006, 
11). It is worth perusing some background in order to clarify this change in critical 
approach. 
Yorubaland (largely Nigeria, and parts of Benin and Togo) is the place of origin 
of the African core of most branches of Santeria. However, this does not mean that there 
was a reified “original” version of the religion in Yorubaland that fractured as the many 
branches of Santeria. Rather, Yoruba religion has always emphasized local responses to 
local conditions, and a certain amount of improvisation is built into Yoruba theology, so 
that practices vary from Ile Ife to Ode Remo, from Oyo to Abeokuta. The majority of 
Yoruba practitioners in Africa were traditionally, and continue to be, initiated to the 
praxes and liturgy of one, two, or more lineages. Differences are thus not the result of 
insularity, and African practitioners tend to be familiar and comfortable with diverse 
expressions, and indeed, worship as a whole is comprised of interdependent parts. Most 
enslaved persons therefore carried their part of what was originally whole in the context 
of extended communities, yet due to this in-built flexibility devotees relocated in Cuba 
were well prepared to maintain some aspect of practice under the most radically 
oppressive of circumstances. 1 Still, and despite new Yoruba arrivals in Cuba as recently 
as the late nineteenth century, forcible divisions of families and generation after 
generation of subsequent divisions increased the challenge and resulted in splintering. 
Practices such as communal oral transmission – for example the four day ceremony in 
which the entire literary corpus 2 is recited, with an approving chant at the end of each 
line by elders – were impossible to maintain. 
If practice is varied in Yorubaland, it is more so in Diaspora, yet, perhaps each 
fragment is capable of acting as a prism and reflecting the whole. For example, Núñez 
writes, “Babalu-Aye has become the Orisha [deity] of miraculous healing and 
compassion in the Caribbean, but he was greatly feared in Africa since he owns smallpox, 
leprosy, and now AIDS” (2006, 377). His necklace is described as “white with blue 
streaks,” and in some Nigerian/Brazilian houses those colors belong to his mother, Nana 
Buruku (2006, 377; Solaye Epega). In Yorubland, it is generally she who is credited with 
healing. One can only begin to imagine the method by which this shift from mother-
healer to father-healer occurred. Perhaps a devotee who had the ase (pronounced ah-shay, 
the life force in specific energetic pattern) of Babalu-Aye but not Nana – who would have 
worked with a priest of Nana in Yorubaland – had to heal without benefit of Nana and 
improvised accordingly. If it worked once, itwould be done again, yet transmission of 
the trajectory of change may have been lost under conditions of relocation or death. One 
point of significance drawn from this is that while Santeria does maintain several key 
Yoruba philosophical paradigms, these are attenuated as the result of dealing with 
dislocation and enforced Christianity under the strictures of slavery. 
But in accord with the Yoruba perspective of local practices, instead of thinking 
in terms of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ systems, ‘lost’ and ‘found’ systems, one can begin with 
the premise that differing systems may all work within themselves to broach the 
numinous. This inclusive perspective is accorded credence amongst varying branches of 
Santeria. For example, when a diviner receives the sign Oyekun, that is, when four pieces 
of coconut, ritually thrown to answer a question, all fall dark side up, according to 
Núñez’s system the answer is “a very bad sign which announces … evil influences,” 
“death and suffering,” (1992, 83; 2006, 85). In other Santeria houses it simply means the 
answer to the question is no. In yet other houses, it means that the dead – the ancestors – 
wish to speak, and when it arises in certain Nigerian practices, people praise it, saying it 
refers to the power of motherhood. Perhaps the relationship between the last two is that 
the dead re-enter the world via reincarnation. Be that as it may, things shift in translation 
from one language to another – for example the gender-free word for God in Yoruba may 
be translated as He in English or Spanish – yet may still render effective guidance for 
resistance when used within a coherent system. Members of differing systems do not tend 
to perceive these differences in competition; members of one house will instruct members 
in other houses to defer to the teachings of their own elders. 
Yet the specificity of what has shifted and how it has shifted calls for 
examination. In Stories, for example, God can be literally Biblical: “He said, ‘Let there 
be light’” – and the deities themselves are no longer black, so that their emotions register 
on their faces in shades of red and purple (2006, 14, 126). At times Núñez frankly states 
that he is retelling a “classic Catholic story,” at other times he claims to be telling an “old 
African story” (2006, 136, 138). There is acknowledgement of colonization. There is no 
devil in Yoruba, but: “The devil appeared before them and said ‘There will be no rain 
until you bow to me and forget the other Orishas.’ The people of Oyo shuddered in fear 
but they said, ‘We honor the Orishas as our ancestors did” (2006, 268). Examination of 
Núñez’s books allows examination of the extent to which this branch of Santeria 
succeeded in resistance. 
The idea of sacrifice has always loomed large in imaginings about Santeria, so it’s 
a good place to start. In Stories there is a sacrifice in almost every tale, and in A Practical 
Guide Núñez provides nineteen detailed pages of ceremonial sacrifices that, generally 
speaking, only initiates may attend and/or perform. All Santeria calls for ebo – the 
“doing” of sacrifice, or making sacred, well articulated by Ventura – and Santeria elders 
in many branches tend to suggest beginning with something simple, a fruit or a yam. 
Núñez himself focuses heavily on blood and his Practical Guide calls for fresh blood at 
every single cowrie divination session, an emphasis on animal sacrifice that is both 
economically prohibitive and highly unusual. The deity stories Núñez tells in fifty pages 
of the Practical Guide are replete with lists of favored ingredients that can only be 
usefully utilized by knowledgeable initiates. While Stories contains more varied 
sacrifices, almost every tale emphasizes the violent or tricky ascension to power of one 
force over another. 
That this is more than registration of political imperialism is suggested by the way 
tales and oracles in both books so often circulate around guilt and punishment in a way 
that is gendered and racialized. Stories confirms A Practical Guide’s theme of 
punishments that are “very terrible and painful,” especially for “those who do not follow 
the religion” (1992, 31, 46). According to A Practical Guide, Babalu-Aye’s ability to 
cure disease arose after he did the severe penance of suffering leprosy for a lack of 
“control over [sexual] desire [for women]” that Núñez characterizes as “frivolous” (1992, 
61-62; 2006, 44). In Stories he is limping, shunned, covered with suppurating sores and 
lives in continual regret of his copulation. As corollary to this association of woman with 
temptation, sin, and taint, the role of Babalu-Aye’s mother, Nana Buruku as healer has 
been obliterated. “Evil influences” are described with racially loaded rhetoric, such as 
“weaving a black web” (1992, 68; repeated 2006, 284). In a story about Eleggua and a 
coconut, Olodumare – God – makes the coconut white to “match your goodness,” then 
punishes wrongdoing by making it “roll through the mud and dirt until you are black 
outside;” in other stories “envy” and “ambition” made protagonists’ “thoughts black” and 
“blackened [their] hearts[s]” (2006, 72, 284, 354). In “The Oracle” of the Practical 
Guide a divination sign which in other systems means “this person must appeal to the 
ancestors for a good life,” in Núñez’s account means “a black, evil dead soul is 
tormenting you” (Fatunmbi, 47; 1992, 104). 3 These notions – sin, male prominence, and 
the idea of blackness as evil, have no roots in Yoruba and are clearly imposed from 
Catholicism. Indeed, the last seems to raise the specter of Spanish guilt reciprocated by 
highly effective haunting on the part of an occluded African ancestor of the religion. 
Reading between readings, they would only be “evil” as long as they were ignored rather 
than respected. 
A Practical Guide provides “Talismans, Spells, and Implorations,” recipes that 
tell the reader “how to” accomplish various ends. Some provide succor by healing 
illnesses or clearing thoughts, but the largest category by far consists of “curses” (1992, 
121). While some curses may denote resistance – to kill an enemy or keep the police 
away may be an act of agency under oppression – many ironically foster the selfsame 
“evil” of “desire” that the deity stories warn against. These curses are designed to break 
up marriages, to control not one’s own desire, but the desire of another, to make a man 
impotent or to bind a lover. Thus dualistic ambiguity about the fact of desire is encoded 
in Núñez’s Santeria praxes, so that while he more than fulfills his initial promise of 
religious bloodletting, in A Practical Guide “sex” turns out to refer to the human lust of 
practitioners. And while Stories is full of tales of the sexual exploits of deities, they 
convey more about Spanish Catholic gender roles than they do about Yoruba concepts of 
humanity or divinity. In one story Núñez’s writes, “you created men and that is good. But 
you also created women and that is not so good. You can reason with men” (2006, 63). 
The Orisa, the deities, are exaggeratedly humanized in the sense that to be human is to 
err, and in very specific ways according to anatomy. Núñez’s “Shango” and “Oggun,” 
male Orisa, are hot tempered and violent, while the female Orisa are sexual temptresses 
(Oshun and Yemoja), martyr-like mothers (Yemoja), faithful wives (Obba), or “pure” 
virgins who are punished horribly upon deflowerment (Yeggua) (2006, 300). Only Oya 
and Obatala straddle the great divide. But even Oya, a female warrior, doesn’t “open the 
door to anyone without my husband’s permission,” and Obatala’s androgyny is resolved 
into two characters, male and female (2006, 166). Núñez would do well to consider 
Lydia Cabrera’s finesse when she describes Yemoja as “androgino, de sexo anfibio. Asi 
se dice El mar. Y hembra, La Mar” – androgynous, of amphibious sex.Thus we say The 
Sea [with masculine pronoun]. And The Sea, [with feminine pronoun]” (Cabrera, 1980, 
28, my translation). Yemoja wears warrior’s clothing, bears a machete, and fights 
alongside her son Shango. Cabrera had to break Spanish pronoun rules to make her point, 
yet Yemoja doesn’t change sex when she changes clothing or behavior; women can be 
“warriors and mothers at once” (Olajubu, 85). Machete in hand, Yemoja remains a female 
and Shango’s mother. Then again, Yemoja is not a woman – she is the spirit of the Sea. 
Sadly, Núñez plays into the worst stereotypes of African Diaspora religions. 
Tropes of Voodoo, often figured by a “throbbing” male drummer or a priest stirring up a 
cauldron of purportedly African “curses,” are well known. While the freight of sexualized 
blackness or racialized sexuality that Voodoo bears in the cultural imaginary is gendered 
according to notions of hyper-masculinity, Santeria bears the fraught burden of inter-
racialized inter-sexuality. In Santeria Afrophobia is complicated by the religion’s 
perceived hybridity, by fear of miscegenation and a homophobic response to the gender 
fluidity that is performed as part of its religious praxes. The figure of the Santero/a is 
discomfiting because his/her Afro-Latino face is read as deceptively disguising or hiding 
‘Africa.’ Thus Santeria, as it is portrayed in cultural imaginary texts such as TV and film, 
circulates around a racialized, sexualized figure that becomes especially terrifying 
because it refuses to be statically male or female, African or European. 
Both Edward Humes – in Buried Secrets, his book on Adolfo de Costanza, a 
Cuban bisexual who self-identified as a Santero and committed the ritualistic Matamoros 
murders – and Ventura, in the “Introduction” to the book reviewed here – tie this terror to 
Latino immigration. As Ventura writes, “Latin American immigration to the United 
States shows no sign of abating, so Santeria will become more and more a part of 
American life.” Ventura posits this as reason to learn something, to explore “how we’ve 
gone slack, how we’ve become hypocritical and dull to what was best in our traditional 
[sic] religions” (1992, v, x). But Humes asserts that “the unique black-magic amoral 
aspects of … Santeria will continue to attract criminals … drugs and violence – 
inevitably will rise (Humes, 376). Núñez’s Practical Guide does too little to further the 
former and even less to counter the latter, what with its pages of “curses.” 
In sum, A Practical Guide is a book that tells solitary, untrained readers how to 
perform a communal, elder-guided set of practices. Self-described as pragmatic, it 
consists of praxes split off from their grounding philosophy of intergenerational 
transmission, and therefore not surprisingly, rather than offering a paradigmatic 
difference that could remedy the social and ecological ills Santeria resists, they are 
termed – magic. This attempt to “open the western mind,” then, allows it to remain split 
off from the body politic (1992, cover blurb). 
Stories is less overtly problematic yet encodes the same issues. It can be read as a 
comfortable set of stories for the western mind, with some delightful turns of phrase and 
adaptions. For example, “[the Couple Who Created] were …larger than can be imagined 
because size did not exist,” and a poor man slept on “a piece of cardboard” (2006, 25, 
306). As a set of stories it succeeds in utilizing varied versions of events to construct 
consistent and entertaining deities. But it does so by playing up flaws, by flattening them 
into stereotypical anthropomorphic caricatures. Like the pages of curses in A Practical 
Guide, the tricky deities in Stories, often violent and capricious troublemakers, confirm 
Humes’ fears of amorality. It is therefore a problematic representation of Santeria that 
reflects its problems back onto Africa. To return to Ventura’s concern for ecology and the 
exploited, one might well question the value of a model of good/evil along the worst 
possible human lines. Orisa are, after all, nature – they are the interrelated four hundred 
and one divine/natural/ethical forces that together comprise what is called, for 
simplicity’s sake, God, in “a nonanthropomorphic form of theism” that still has clear 
presence in some versions of Santeria (Verger, 36). In such versions Shango, situated at 
the juncture of nature and ethics, is lightning and justice, not a blowhard, selfish bully. 
If one were to generously take the notions of good and evil, of black and white, of 
male and female as the signs of a conflicted birth that is open to reconciliation, one would 
still be left with the ultimate problem of these books according Núñez’s own terms. 
Ventura refers to the fact that Santeria praxis is largely communal and Núñez notes that 
“It’s very important that everything be the way the Elders did it” (1992, 19). He often 
states that what he describes cannot be performed without initiation. Yet A Practical 
Guide largely consists of these proscribed practices. Generally speaking, such praxes are 
conveyed from elders to novitiates via active participation, and it is considered, at the 
very least, bad form to discuss them with those who have not experienced them first 
hand. This has to do with membership in community and with the requirement of 
presence that stymies the mind-body split, a split furthered by sitting in your living room 
reading not about, but how-to-do something that is meant to be fully experienced with 
others. The community is missing and the elders are missing. 4 This, and related 
problems, are registered in the way the Stories are told. For example, Julio Garcia-Cortez 
tells the tale of how the Parrot feather became sacred in Pataki: Leyendas y Misterios de 
los Orishas Africanos. In his version “el viejo Lechuza,” the elderly Owl, counsels the 
community against an error, and when they don’t heed her advice “Fue La Lechuza quien 
le narró,” it was the Owl who told God what had happened (Garcia-Cortex, 54,56). In 
Núñez’s version the owl is not even present and the birds have no guidance. La Lechuza 
– a bird of the Elder Mothers of the Night – has disappeared. While Yoruba tradition 
venerates the Elder Mothers, in Núñez “no woman would admit to being old” (2006, 63). 
While this may be read as a simple shift in narration, the absence of the female awake in 
the dark is the ultimate core of the tale that Núñez tells. And this trope of absence 
reiterates occlusion of “the dark continent of [the] body” of “Mama Africa” (White; 
Oyewumi, 2004). 
 
Works Cited 
Brandon, George, “Hierarchy Without a Head: Observations of Changes in the Social 
Organization of Some Afroamerican Religions in the United States, 1959-1999, with 
Special Reference to Santeria”, Arch. de Sc. Soc. Des Rel., 2002, (janvier-mars). 
 
Brown, David H., Santeria Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation in an Afro-Cuban 
Religion, U. of Chicago Press, 2003. 
 
Cabrera, Lydia, Anago: Vocabulario Lucumi, Ediciones Universal, 1970. 
 
Cabrera, Lydia, Yemaya y Ochun: Iyalorichas y Olorichas, Coleccion del Chicheruku en 
el exilio, 1980. 
 
De La Torre, Miguel. A., “Ochun: (N)either the (M)other of All Cubans (N)or the 
Bleached Virgin”, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, V.69.4, 2001. 
 
Garcia-Cortez, Julio, Pataki: Leyendas y Misterios de los Orishas Africanos, Ediciones 
Universal, Miami, Florida, 1980. 
 
Hobson Janell Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture, Routledge, 
2005. 
 
Humes, Edward, Buried Secrets, Dutton, 1991. 
 
Mason, John, Olookun: Owner of Rivers and Seas, Yoruba Theological Archministry, 
1996. 
 
Murphy, Joseph M. and Sanford, Mei-Mei, Osun Across the Waters, Indiana U. Press, 
2001. 
 
Murphy, Joseph M., Santeria: African Spirits in America, Beacon Press, 1993. 
 
Murphy, Joseph, “Black Religion and Black Magic: Prejudice and Projection inImages 
of African-derived Religions, ” presented at the Annual Meeting of the American 
Academy of Religion, Anaheim, 1989, ilarioba.tripod.com/scholars/murphyblackrel.htm, 
retrieved 5/1/2007. 
 
Núñez, Luis Manuel, Santeria: A Practical Guide to Afro-Caribbean Magic, Spring 
Publications, Woodstock CT, 1992. 
 
Núñez, Luis Manuel, Santeria Stories, Spring Publications, Woodstock CT, 2006. 
 
Olajubu, Oyeronke, Women in the Yoruba Religious Sphere, State U. of New York Press, 
2003. 
 
Oyewumi, Oyeronke, “There She Is: Mama Africa!, ” Jenda: A Journal of Culture and 
African Women Studies, Issue 5, 2004. 
 
Verger, Pierre, “The Yoruba High God: A Review of the Source,” Odu: Journal of 
Yoruba and Related Studies, 2:2, 1996, 19-40. 
 
White, E. Frances, The Dark Contintent of Our Bodies, Temple University Press, 2001. 
 
 
1 For more on how and why changes occurred and practices continued, see Joseph Murphy, David Brown, 
and George Brandon. 
2 This consists of many thousands of verses that encode interlaced history, medicine, stories, proverbs, and 
other forms of sacred liturgy. 
3 That the sign Eyife, has two sides of white coconut showing in one book and three in the other does not 
engender confidence in Núñez exposition on praxes (1992, 81; 2006, 84). 
4 For example, from an academic standpoint, there are no citations at all. 
	Works Cited