Candomblé, Santería and Yoruba orishas: one faith, many names

One tradition, carried across an ocean

The religion of the orishas began among the Yoruba people of West Africa, in the region of present-day Nigeria and Benin. Through the transatlantic slave trade, Yoruba people were carried in great numbers to the Caribbean and to Brazil, and they carried their faith with them. Under enslavement and colonial suppression, that faith survived, but it adapted, and in different places it took different forms with different names.

The result is that the same divine powers, the same orishas described in our guide to the major orishas, are venerated today under parallel names across several distinct traditions. They are relatives instead of copies: each grew in its own soil. This article maps the main branches (West African Ìṣẹ̀ṣe, Cuban Santería and Brazilian Candomblé) and explains the spellings and the history of syncretism that connect and distinguish them. For the foundations, see what an orisha is and what Ifá is.

Ìṣẹ̀ṣe: the Yoruba homeland tradition

Ìṣẹ̀ṣe (often written Isese) is the indigenous religion of the Yoruba homeland, the tradition as practised in Nigeria and Benin, from which the diaspora forms descend. Here the divine powers are the òrìṣà, served alongside veneration of ancestors and within the wider system that includes Ifá divination and the supreme being Olódùmarè.

This is the root. When we speak of Santería or Candomblé as diaspora traditions, Ìṣẹ̀ṣe is the source they flow from, though it, too, is a living tradition of the present day, not a fixed point in the past. It continues to be practised and to develop in West Africa, and many practitioners across the diaspora look to it as they reconnect with the tradition's origins.

One faith across an ocean, and I'd read the different spellings as history rather than error.

Santería in Cuba, and Candomblé in Brazil

Santería developed in Cuba among enslaved Yoruba people. It's also known as Regla de Ocha or Lucumí, and in it the orishas are called Oricha or Ocha, in Spanish-inflected spellings. Under colonial suppression, openly practising an African religion was dangerous, so practitioners syncretised the orishas with Catholic saints, venerating an orisha behind the image of a saint whose feast, colours or story could be matched to it. This was a survival strategy: a way to keep the faith alive under a regime that forbade it, not a conversion to Catholicism.

Candomblé developed in Brazil, and is organised into nations: *nações*, such as Ketu (Nagô), Jeje and Angola: that reflect different African origins and liturgical languages. In Candomblé the divine powers are the Orixás, in Portuguese-inflected spellings, and here too the orixás were syncretised with Catholic saints under the same pressures of suppression. The nations differ in language, chants and detail, so Candomblé isn't one uniform practice but a family of related ones.

A related but distinct Brazilian religion is Umbanda, which emerged later and blends Yoruba-derived, Catholic, Kardecist-spiritist and Indigenous elements in its own way. It's often mentioned alongside Candomblé, but it's not the same thing, and the two shouldn't be conflated.

Parallel names across the traditions

The table below lines up a few orishas across Yoruba, Cuban and Brazilian usage, alongside the Catholic saint each was commonly syncretised with in the diaspora. The saint pairings are historical associations, and they varied by place and community, read them as survival-era correspondences, not as claims that an orisha simply is a saint.

Note how the spelling shifts by tradition even where the power is the same: Òrìṣà / Orisha in Yoruba usage, Orixá in Brazil, Oricha or Ocha in Cuba. The differences aren't errors; they record the separate paths the tradition took through Portuguese-speaking Brazil and Spanish-speaking Cuba.

Inside a terreiro

A Candomblé community is a terreiro, the house and grounds where the orixás are served, led by a mãe de santo or pai de santo, the mother or father of saint, and made up of filhos de santo, the initiated children of the house. Salvador da Bahia is the centre, and the oldest houses there, beginning with Casa Branca do Engenho Velho in the early nineteenth century, trace their lineages by name.

A public ceremony, a festa, opens with drumming on the three atabaques and songs in the liturgical language of the nation, Yoruba for Ketu houses. The filhos dance in a circle, the roda, and one by one the orixás arrive, descending into their initiated children in trance and dancing in the costume and with the emblems of that orixá: Xangô's double axe, Oxum's mirror, Iansã's sword. The word that runs through all of it is axé, the life force that the house holds and transmits, and that a visitor is told they can feel in the room. Whether or not one believes that, the drumming, the movement and the concentration of a community on one thing for several hours are real, and they are what a visitor remembers.

The Cuban house, and the year in white

In Cuba the equivalent community is an ilé, a house under a padrino or madrina, the godparent who initiated its members. Initiation into Regla de Ocha, the kariocha, is the ceremony most often described by outsiders and least often described accurately. What can be said is that it lasts a week, that the initiate emerges as an iyawó, and that the iyawó then spends a year dressed entirely in white, head covered, observing restrictions on where they go, what they touch and who touches them. Seeing a person in white from head to foot on a Havana street is seeing that year.

The year is public and the ceremony is not, and the distinction is the tradition's own. This site describes what an iyawó is. It does not describe what happens in the room.

Umbanda, set apart

Umbanda dates its founding to 1908, when a young man named Zélio de Moraes, at a Spiritist session in Niterói near Rio de Janeiro, is said to have received a spirit calling himself the Caboclo of the Seven Crossroads, who announced a new religion open to all. Umbanda took the orixás from Candomblé, spirit mediumship from Allan Kardec's Spiritism, saints from Catholicism, and spirits of Indigenous Brazilians, the caboclos, and of enslaved Africans, the pretos velhos, from Brazilian history itself.

So an Umbanda session may invoke Oxalá, receive a caboclo, and consult a preto velho who smokes a pipe and speaks in the voice of an old enslaved man giving advice. That is a Brazilian religion, and a large one, and it is not Candomblé. Practitioners of both would want the difference kept.

Words to get right

How to read the spellings, and the syncretism

Two things need holding onto. First, the spellings are a map of history. Where you see Orixá you're looking at the Brazilian branch; Oricha or Ocha points to Cuba; Òrìṣà, with its Yoruba diacritics, to the West African homeland. The same is true of the individual names. Ṣàngó, Changó, Xangô are one power in three tongues. None is more 'correct' than another; each is right within its own tradition.

Second, the syncretism with Catholic saints deserves to be read on its own terms. It was not a merging of equals or a quiet conversion. It was a strategy of survival under colonial and religious suppression: by placing a saint's image where a watching authority expected one, enslaved and colonised people kept their own orishas alive. To treat Santería or Candomblé as 'just Catholicism with other names' gets the history exactly backwards. The saints were the mask; the orishas were what the mask protected. Today many practitioners distinguish clearly between the two, and some work to disentangle the orishas from the Catholic overlay entirely.