Egún
Venerating our Ancestors.
We stand tall on the shoulders of our ancestors.
Before God, before Orisha, before anything we have our ancestors. In Lucumí, venerating and taking care of our ancestors is central to everything we do. No ceremony is complete without first offering to the ancestors, and we continue to call on and praise them at every step through prayers and songs.
It’s important to understand what we mean when we say ancestors. In the Lucumí view, ancestors are both our direct blood lineage and also our ritual lineage from whom we descend through initiation. There are our Egún. Other spirits of the dead, however beloved, are not ancestors, but may be worked with in other ways.
During and after the trans-Atlantic slave trade, many adaptations occurred for our early Lucumí ancestors who had to find new ways to keep their religion alive on Cuban soil. Part of these adaptations meant the loss of the formal Egúngún masquerade dances that are such an important feature of West African cultures. In the New World, the early Lucumí retained the concept and connection to Egún through floor-based shrines like the one pictured above. These Egún shrines consist of glasses of water, coffee, rum, wine, and honey, along with flowers and other components, bordered by a semi-circle of efún - or it’s New World equivalent, the egg-shell chalk called cascarilla. This semi-circle represents the boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead, with lines going through it like the rays of the sun as it sets on one world and rises on another.
Another New World adaptation was the use of Espiritismo through which many practitioners pray to and connect with both blood ancestors and other spirits, as well as spirit guides. Espiritismo’s roots come from 19th Century France, where a man named Hippolyte Léon Denizard Revail established his own doctrine of the growing spiritualism movement under the pen name Allan Kardec. Kardec’s Spiritism was a more codified version of the spiritual séances and psychic performances that held the attention of Victorians.
Spiritism crossed the water, and spread quickly throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, where it encountered Afro-Diasporic religious practiced. In Cuba, these spread fused together to create a uniquely Cuban Espiritismo that drew on European, Kongo, Yoruba, and Indigenous Taíno influences.
Today, many practitioners of Lucumí continue to integrate these practices into their lives - separate from Orisha and Egún work, but of no less importance - through the use of bóvedas (altars) and misas. The misa, or spiritual mass, is a communal ceremony similar to the French séance, in which spirits are called through prayers, songs, and sometimes drumming to attend the rituals. These spirits give messages and occasionally mount the heads of practitioners in order to perform healing work.
No matter which way we approach our ancestors, we do so because we know that it is to the dead whom we owe everything we have. The dead continue to have an influence on the world of the living, often serving as that little voice in the back of our head that warns us of danger or pushes up to choose a certain option that would be better.
When our ancestors are not well, when we do not take care of them, the effects on our lives can be troubling. Neglected ancestors cannot protect us, and may try to get our attention through a number of different means. But when our ancestors are well, we stand on a firm foundation from which to live our lives.
So though the Orisha are often the most talked about aspect of the Lucumí religion by outsiders, the Lucumí ourselves always say first that we pay homage to our ancestors, to the lineage that connects us all back to the very beginning of humanity, and even to the beginning of time itself.
To read some of the stories of our religion’s specific ancestors, click here.