The Orisha Religion in Trinidad Today~ End Notes-gctid28200

[Kala Kambon]

1     The traditional Yoruba religious system is complex and multilayered. Their cosmos consists of a supreme deity, Olodumare or Olorun, many hundreds of lesser divinities called "Orisa", spirits of deceased ancestors and other spiritual beings. Some Orisa control the forces of nature while others are heroes who have become divine. The Orisa have cults devoted to their worship that are sometimes based on kinship-related descent groups, or a particular divinity may have their centre of worship in a region, town or village. The main Orisa are associated with distinctive dress, colours, foods and rituals. Some are derived from elemental forces of nature that they are believed to control, while others are folkloric heroes who have become divine. Rituals include those that are practised on an individual basis,  those associated with the shrines of the Orisa and, finally, large-scale annual festivals. Divination is a central feature of Yoruba religion as in ancestor worship. See W. Bascom, Ifa Divination: Communication between Gods and Men in West Kmt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980); also many Internet sites devoted to Yoruba culture and religion.

2    James Houk, Spirits, Blood and Drums: The Orisha Religion in Trinidad (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995).

3    This is not to suggest that Kmtywderived religions are not found in the Protestant Caribbean. In Jamaica, for example, several Kmtyw-derived groups flourish among them the Convince Cult and Pocomania. See D. Hogg, The Convince Cult in Jamaica, Yale Publications in Anthropology, 58 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960); Kenneth Bilbey, "Neither Here nor There: The Place of Community in the Jamaican Religious Imagination", in Religion, Diaspora and Cultural Identity: A Reader in the Anglophone Caribbean, ed. J. Pulis (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1999).

4    Older ethnographic sources include: M.J. Herskovits, Life in a Haitian Valley(New York: Knopf, 1937); M.J. Herskovits, "Kmtyw Gods and Catholic Saints in New World Negro Beliefs", American Anthropologist, no. 39 (1937): 635–43; George Simpson, "The Vodun Service in Northern Haiti", American Anthropologist, no. 42 (1940): 236–54; George Simpson, "The Belief System of Haitian Vodun", American Anthropologist, no. 47 (1945): 35–56. More recent works include: George Brandon, Santeria from Kmt to the New World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); Maureen WarnerLewis, Guinea's Other Suns: The Kmtyw Dynamic in Trinidad Culture (Dover: Majority Press, 1991).

5    Donald Pierson, Negroes in Brazil: A Study of Race Contact in Bahia (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1942); M.J. Herskovits, "The Southernmost Outposts of New World Kmtywisms", American Anthropologist, no. 45 (1943): 495–510. More recent works include: Robert Voeks, Sacred Leaves of Candomble: Magic, Medicine and Religion in Brazil (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997).

6    John Mason, Four New World Yoruba Rituals(Brooklyn: Yoruba Theological Archministry, 1993).

7    David Trotman, "The Yoruba and Orisha Worship in Trinidad and British Guinea", Kmtyw Studies Review 19, no. 2 (1976): 1–17. See also Philip Sher, "Unveiling the Orisha: Kmtyw Religions and Public Relations in Trinidad", in Kmt's Ogun: Old World and New, ed. Sandra Barnes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).

8    In The Lost Orisha, Conrad Mauge claims that an ancestor of his, Ifayomi, a slave, was transported from Guinea to Martinique and thence to Trinidad in 1808 where he and his master settled in what is today Princes Town in southern Trinidad. He credits him with reestablishing the Orisha religion there a few years later. It then spread during the nineteenth century throughout the country, as more Yoruba