Excerpt from Urban Santeria:
New World Magic for Urban And Suburban Populations
ISBN 0-9725164-8-4

What Urban Santeria Is Not

Many people have mistaken Santeria for Santa Claus. Obviously, it does not work that way. Although Santeria is a path of action, it does not function as a self-serving cornucopia for the practitioner.

I have always followed three basic spiritual paths: The Medicine Path, Wicca and Santeria. Selfishly speaking, when you have a time parameter, Medicine Path is slow, Wicca is medium and Santeria is fast. For this reason, some people see Santeria as the path which gets more done for the individual, from a selfish standpoint.

Popular criticism of Santeria says that it is a religion of the selfish. This of course, refers to the widespread belief that by doing the ebbos, you can get the Orisha to give you what you want. All of this is nonsense, of course. But most traditional ebbos are described in texts as means to self-serving ends. I will be the first in line to say there is nothing wrong with serving yourself. I am grateful to the Orisha every day for the magnificent bounty they rain down upon my head. I am unashamed to say that I asked them for most of that bounty. It’s cool. Generations of Orisha worshippers have done the same.

What Urban Santeria Is

One must admit that if you take the greater amount of the traditional ebbos on their own, you don’t find a lot of altruistic sentiment in their expression. This book empowers practitioners to take on more of those self-serving concepts in the performance of the ebbos, but it does so with a view toward spiritual advancement that may have influence on others. The ebbos are bold, eclectic, progressive and challenging. They represent the expression of a worship which reaches beyond the microcosm. Many of the ebbos in this book address matters that empower the spirit, without necessarily serving a base survival need. Olokun’s Find the Answer to a Deep Question Ebbo is one of these. It requires the petitioner to address spiritual conditions and look within the heart for a solution to a problem.

There are ebbos here which are performed entirely for the purpose of giving thanks, such as the Ebbo to Thank Oshun for a New Love. It always struck me that the only thanks the Orisha got for a traditional ebbo was the derecho, left in a geographical location recognized as the Orisha’s domain. Perhaps we should place more emphasis on the giving of thanks. Even from a selfish standpoint, giving thanks is a very important part of Orisha worship. The benefits alone are worth the trouble.

Some of these ebbos fly in the face of the traditional Santeria theme of patriarchy. Yemaya’s Ebbo to Enable a Woman to Take Her Personal Power is a good example of how a new breed of practitioner is coming to the forefront of the religion in the twenty-first century. The world is not the same as it was when we hid behind syncretic relationships with the Christian saints, from slave owners and later, from some of the Fundamentalist Christians who felt they could not exist in the same world with us and our beliefs. Although we remember with honor the ancestors who steadfastly kept the religion in the face of incredible, diasporic resistance, the progeny of those former slaves is ready to take its rightful, equal place in the modern scheme of things. Never again will the white aristocracy hold enough sway to bring about the clandestine environment that created syncretic Santeria. Now we take power in the earth-space-time continuum as never before. All of us take power—not just the supporters of the patriarchy.

Santeria is traditionally a religion of rituals and methods of getting something from the Orisha for giving them the right kind of gifts, for the most part. Very little is suggested in New World writings about Orisha worship as a regular occurrence (without asking for something). It is my job to present and explain these methods so that they may be implemented. Elements of other faiths may be used, tailored to Orisha worship.

Traditional Santeria usually addresses the symptoms and rarely seems to treat the disease. For example, there are lots of traditional ebbos that get you prosperity, but nothing to help you become a prosperous person, who can earn a wage and be successful in the modern world. Or there are traditional cleansing baths, which will get rid of the symptoms of a sickness that may have been caused by stress. But nothing has been done to eliminate the stress itself. Urban Santeria will address the recovery that needs to take place in order not to need all these ebbos which treat symptoms. What if we lived in a world where the Orisha awakened in us the inner strength to be free of disease, poverty and loneliness? Well, we do live in such a world, and the Orisha are ready and willing to impart to us these gifts. It’s just that if you want their gifts to last, then you must address the underlying causes of poverty, disease and loneliness within yourself. It’s hard work, and most omorisha are scared shitless of it (as are our brethren in the mundane world).

— Urban Santeria was published in September 2003 by Wind in the Forge Media in cooperation with Three Moons Media.

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