Lucumí language

many people still believe voodoo is the work of the devil and the antithesis of Christianity.

Cross the water to Cuba and you'll find Santeria, also called Regla de Ocha or Lukumi, built primarily from the Yoruba religion of what's now Nigeria and Benin.

Yoruba people trafficked into Cuba came to be known there as Lukumi, and it's their name for the tradition that many practitioners still prefer over Santeria.

a term that literally means way of the saints, and was originally a bit of an outsider's label for what looked like an obsession with Catholic icons.

The supreme creator here is Olodumare, whose life force, ashe, flows through everything and becomes accessible to people through the orishas.

I think

Lukumi is a great signing at the back.

Lukumi is a great signing at the back.

And I think there's still a little more that has to come.

I was hearing about Xerxe coming.

Another one is

underrated.

Lukumi.

Whenever the slave trade went on, we moved from Africa to Spanish countries.

And that's how you ended up getting Santeria, Lucumi, Candomblé.

Like they all have similar things.

Like we all have Orishas, even in Brazil, instead of saying Ashe, they say Ashe.

The Yoruba people were taken across the Atlantic, and their cultures and their stories and your mythology and cosmology became this thriving Afro-diasporic spirituality.

Lucumi, Santeria, Candomble, all of these come from the Orisha Ifa mythology and spirituality.

So the Yoruba people are, in a sense, like dust.

They're indigenous, and yet they are diasporic.

I like some of the moves that they made.

Lukumi, the Bologna defender, what a fantastic, uh, what a fantastic defender he is.

You could even see the video of, uh, Spalletti hugging him, just showing how important he is.

Ajvbegovic, I love him.

We waited so long to kind of find out about the goalkeeper news.

For me, Vicario pre-Tottenham would be a great signing, so I think going into the season, I hope he finds that form with the solidified Juve defense, bringing in the guys we did, Lukumi, um, you know, Çelik on the right side.

I think we could see a better version given the pace of play in Serie A, given I think our defense will look a lot better than Spurs' defense did last year.

So for me, for a loan, I like it.

And, uh, you know, I haven't really had this feeling because, I mean, we're going into a game this Sunday and there's...

Are there any priorities that we have left? Yeah, there's, there's a couple priorities I think that we have left, but I've never gotten the feeling like I did last summer where we were just doing nothing and we were gonna get left high and dry.

Like, I'm still feeling okay because I think Lukumi was a hell of a signing.

Great bang for your buck.

I have friends who practice differently.

I have a few friends who do practice an African traditional religion, who practice Ifa or one of its derivatives, specifically Lukumi.

They'll tell me things and I listen.

I recognize

And I'm curious, is this a family member, like a grandparent? Or what do you mean when you say you brought your child to this elder for a religious rite?

Yeah, so I'm a devotee of Yoruba Lukumi, which is often understood or referred to as Santeria.

So it's an African indigenous religion.

And I find myself really hesitant to talk about it because it has been so... maligned and misunderstood within the colonial Americas.

So when I say an elder, I'm talking about a spiritual elder who can be called a priest or a priestess.

And so a spiritual elder within the Lukumi tradition is someone who is really responsible for taking care of a spiritual community, you know, the same way that a pastor or a reverend or another elder in a Christian context takes care of people.

So we're traveling to see our spiritual elder for a religious ceremony that involved like a lot of prayer, food, divination, and sort of in this holy context, like this moment emerged.

And it was my kiddo's first introduction to sort of collective worship.