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Palo Monte
Palo Monte is a living Afro-Cuban religion descended from the Kongo peoples of Central Africa. It is not Yorùbá and it is not a branch of Santería, though the two have lived side by side in Cuba for two centuries; it is not “black magic”, a name given to it by those who policed it. What follows is for education: what scholars and the tradition's own elders have recorded about the nganga, the people who keep one, and the ways a palero asks a question. A consultation belongs to a tata or yaya nganga and to the dead they work with, and nothing on these pages stands in for one.
Introduction
The word covers a religion, a way of working, and the people who do it. Regla de Congo — the Congo rule — is what practitioners call the whole; Palo Monte, Palo Mayombe, Briyumba and Kimbisa name its branches; a palero or palera is one who has been received into it. Its centre is not a book or a corpus of verses but an object: the nganga, or prenda, a vessel in which the earth, the sticks of the forest, iron and the remains of a dead person are gathered and kept, and through which the keeper works.
These pages describe that world from the outside, from the record left by Lydia Cabrera, who listened to Congo elders in Cuba for forty years, and by the anthropologists and linguists who have followed her. They say what the tradition is, where its words come from, and how a question is put to the nganga — and they stop where the tradition itself stops outsiders: at the making, the feeding and the working of a prenda, at initiation, and at the meaning of a throw.
A path through it
Six short pieces, in the order that makes each one make sense. The throw comes last, after the reader knows whose instrument it is.
Why this section exists
The owner asked for a page that honours the paleros. The honest way to do that on a shop's website is not to imitate their work but to describe it accurately, to name the scholars who took it seriously when the law did not, and to refuse to sell anything off it. Fernando Ortiz's first book, in 1906, called Cuba's Congo and Lucumí priests brujos — witches — and helped make their religion a police matter; he spent the rest of his life retracting the frame. Cabrera's El Monte, half a century later, let the elders speak in their own words. Ochoa's Society of the Dead, in 2010, described a working house in Havana as a society of the living and the dead with its own ethics of care.
That is the company these pages keep. The chamalongo page throws pieces and counts them because counting is arithmetic; it does not read them because reading is the tata's, and the site would have to invent what it does not know.
- Fernando Ortiz, Los negros brujos (Hampa afro-cubana) (1906) — page reference not yet checked · historical record
- Lydia Cabrera, El Monte: Igbo, Finda, Ewe Orisha, Vititi Nfinda (1954), prologue — page reference not yet checked
- Todd Ramón Ochoa, Society of the Dead: Quita Manaquita and Palo Praise in Cuban Kongo Material Culture (2010), introduction — page reference not yet checked
- Stephan Palmié, Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition (2002), chapter 3 — page reference not yet checked
Three ways a palero asks
The chamalongo
Pieces of coconut shell — sea shells in some houses — thrown on the ground and counted by how many land pale face up. The one instrument the site simulates, as mechanics only.
Throw the chamalongoThe vititi mensu
A small mirror set in the mouth of a horn packed with the nganga's substances, into which the tata gazes. Described on these pages, never simulated: there is nothing a browser could honestly show.
Read about itThe dead speaking
In ceremony the nfumbe of the prenda may mount a practitioner and answer directly. Not an instrument at all, and not something a page can stand in for.
Read about it
What these pages rest on
Three works carry most of the section: Cabrera's two books and Ochoa's. Everything else is cited where it is used, and the practitioner dictionaries in the owner's archive are labelled whenever a word comes from them.
Lydia Cabrera
El Monte: Igbo, Finda, Ewe Orisha, Vititi Nfinda (1954, La Habana: Ediciones C.R.)
Lydia Cabrera
Reglas de Congo: Palo Monte Mayombe (1979, Miami: Ediciones Universal)
Todd Ramón Ochoa
Society of the Dead: Quita Manaquita and Palo Praise in Cuban Kongo Material Culture (2010, Berkeley: University of California Press)
Palo Monte is an educational section. Satin Cradle is not a tata or yaya nganga, a palero, an initiated practitioner or an oracle, and does not offer consultations. Nothing here is needed for any practice, and nothing on these pages is for sale.