Centuries ago beyond the Atlantic in Africa, one of the oldest religions in the world emerged, based on the belief in the Orishas beings of which we are children and these in turn children of Oloddumare that is presented through Olofin and Olorun mediators of the Yoruba Pantheon, the wisdom and the highest divinity of all existence.
From the very existence of man we have believed in the Gods, almighty beings to whom we have attributed the will to dominate creation, the greatest elements of the earth, the universe, the other world and the human being himself.
The Yorubas baptized, resembled and divinized the energies of nature and called them Orishas. The Yoruba pantheon has 401 different deities having great complexity in their cosmology.
The supreme God Yoruba, Olodumare or Olorun does not possess an organized priesthood or temples in his honor, although he is invoked and asked for his blessing. The Yoruba religion affirms that when a person dies, his soul enters the kingdom of the ancestors from where, they continue to have influence on the earth. That is why ancestor worship (eggun) plays an important role in the Yoruba religion. Some important Orishas are Eshu, who rules fate; Shango, the thunder god; and Oggún, the god of iron and modern technology.
The Orishas left descendants who are the Kings of the different regions that still exist today, so only these crown Osha that comes from ancestral blood and they are responsible for maintaining peace and religious doctrine with their blessing to future generations.
The Yoruba religion varies significantly from one kingdom to another; the same deity can be masculine in one town and feminine in the next, that is why the same deities have various paths, according to how they venerate each other, although in the end their essential characteristics are the same, in this way the case may arise. that the characteristics of two gods can be included in a single deity. In summary, notwithstanding the multiplicity of deities, the Yoruba religion is considered to be a monotheistic religion with a single omnipotent creator god ruling the entire universe, along with several hundred minor deities, each with specific power domains, laws, paths, and with it an endless number of stories destined to the growth and spiritual development of man.
With the inhuman trafficking of African slaves to the Caribbean and other parts of America, the colonizers forbade them to freely exercise their religion, so they decided to hide it under the multiplicity of Catholic saints, thus their African Gods took a relationship with their related characteristics the new world they lived in and their new and obligatory beliefs. This led to syncretism in the Yoruba diaspora, where today the same African deity can be called by either his African or Catholic name.
Being this in Cuba after long processes the birth of the Rule of Osha or Santeria, successor of said religion and without changing much these customs the Orishas are worshiped and they are crowned trying to eliminate the problems that present themselves to human beings .
List of Orishas for Download
