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Sources & further reading
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.
Works cited
Academic
Lydia Cabrera
El Monte: Igbo, Finda, Ewe Orisha, Vititi Nfinda (1954, La Habana: Ediciones C.R.)
The foundational ethnography of Afro-Cuban religion, from decades of conversation with Lucumí and Congo practitioners; the source for most of what is said here about the nganga, the mpungu and the ways of asking. Written in the practitioners' own Spanish, and quoted only in paraphrase.
Lydia Cabrera
Reglas de Congo: Palo Monte Mayombe (1979, Miami: Ediciones Universal)
Her book devoted to the Congo rules alone: the branches, the ranks, the vocabulary and a collection of signatures (firmas), reproduced there and not here.
Todd Ramón Ochoa
Society of the Dead: Quita Manaquita and Palo Praise in Cuban Kongo Material Culture (2010, Berkeley: University of California Press)
An anthropologist's account of a Havana Palo house in the late 1990s and 2000s: the dead, the prenda as a gathering of their substance, and the everyday work of a tata and his people. The most careful description in English of what a nganga is to those who keep one.
Stephan Palmié
Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition (2002, Durham: Duke University Press)
On how Cuban thought sets the Congo idiom of Palo beside the Lucumí idiom of Ocha — work and worship, the two read against each other — and on the history of the accusation of witchcraft.
Jesús Fuentes Guerra and Armin Schwegler
Lengua y ritos del Palo Monte Mayombe: dioses cubanos y sus fuentes africanas (2005, Madrid / Frankfurt: Iberoamericana / Vervuert)
A linguist's tracing of the Palo ritual vocabulary to Kikongo, word by word; the source for the etymologies on these pages.
Robert Farris Thompson
Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (1983, New York: Random House)
The chapter on Kongo art and religion follows the nkisi and the cosmogram from the Congo to Cuba and the United States; the source for the link between the firma and the Kongo cosmogram.
Wyatt MacGaffey
Religion and Society in Central Africa: The BaKongo of Lower Zaire (1986, Chicago: University of Chicago Press)
The standard account of Kongo religion in Africa — Nzambi, the dead, and the minkisi — against which the Cuban forms are described here as descendants, not copies.
Historical record
Fernando Ortiz
Los negros brujos (Hampa afro-cubana) (1906, Madrid: Librería de Fernando Fé)
The first book-length study of Afro-Cuban religion, written from the criminology of its day and titled accordingly; cited only as the record of how the tradition was seen and policed a century ago, and of what Ortiz himself later retracted. Public domain.
Practitioner-written (labelled where used)
Practitioner compilations (unknown authorship)
Diccionario Español–Bantú, Diccionario de Palo Monte, Glosario and Cantos de Palo (2010)
Circulating practitioner word-lists and song texts in the owner's reference archive, unattributed and unverified. Used on this site for vocabulary only, labelled as such — including the one entry that says the chamalongo pieces are seven and not four.
Practitioner ebook (unknown authorship)
El Chamalongo (2005)
A compiled ebook in the owner's archive that has not yet been opened; the one text seen so far that is devoted to the throw itself. Until it is read and its statements weighed, nothing on these pages rests on it.
How citations are shown
A citation names the work and, where a chapter or page has been confirmed against the text, the place. Where it has not, the page says “page reference not yet checked” — the work is the source; the exact place is still to be verified. No fact on these pages rests on an unnamed website, and no reading of a throw is published without a named source in its own words.
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.