What is Palo Monte?

Tradition described: Palo Monte / Regla de Congo (Cuba)

What is Palo Monte?

Palo Monte is one of the Afro-Cuban religions, and the one whose roots are Central African rather than West African. Its practitioners call the whole tradition the Regla de Congo, the Congo rule, and themselves paleros and paleras, or more formally tata and yaya nganga — fathers and mothers of the nganga. The name Palo — “stick” — comes from the sticks of the monte, the wild bush, which are gathered into the tradition's central object and give it its name; Monte is the bush itself, which Cabrera's elders spoke of as a place of powers rather than a place of trees.

What organises the religion is not a corpus of verses, as in Ifá, nor a pantheon served in shrines, as in Regla de Ocha, but the nganga or prenda: a vessel, usually an iron cauldron or a clay pot, in which earth, sticks, iron, stones, animal remains and the remains of a dead person are gathered, and in which that dead person — the nfumbe — is held to reside and to work with the keeper. A palero's relationship is with that dead one and with the powers, the mpungu, whose names the vessel carries. Palo is above all a religion of the dead; Ochoa's title, Society of the Dead, is a description, not a flourish.

Three confusions are worth clearing at the start. Palo is not Santería: Regla de Ocha is Yorùbá-derived, Palo is Kongo-derived, and though many Cubans are initiated in both and the two have borrowed from each other for two centuries, they are different religions with different languages, objects and dead. Palo is not Espiritismo, the Kardec-derived spiritism that also sits in many of the same houses. And Palo is not “black magic” — that phrase belongs to the criminology that prosecuted it, and Palmié's history of the accusation is the place to read about how it stuck.

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