Lazarus and Babalu-Aye: How Two Suffering Figures Became One

The Cuban identification of Babalu-Aye with Saint Lazarus rests on a detail of Catholic tradition that is easy to miss and that George Brandon's history of Santeria's formation treats as the specific hinge on which the whole syncretism turns. Catholic tradition actually carries two distinct figures named Lazarus: Lazarus of Bethany, the friend Jesus is said to have raised from the dead, later venerated as a bishop, and a second, unrelated Lazarus who appears only in a parable, a poor beggar covered in sores who lies at a rich man's gate while dogs lick his wounds. Popular devotion in Cuba attached itself overwhelmingly to the second figure, the beggar of the parable, because his image, an old man on crutches, body marked by open sores, dogs at his side, matched Babalu-Aye's own iconography closely enough that enslaved and later free Yoruba descended Cubans could venerate one image and mean both figures without hiding either. The dogs carry the same explanatory weight twice over: read in the parable as a sign of the beggar's abandonment among the animals rather than among people, and read in Babalu-Aye's own tradition as loyal companions who tend the wounds his human community will not touch. Brandon's account situates this specific pairing, rather than any general resemblance between African and Catholic figures, as the reason this syncretism took hold so completely and so early, becoming, alongside the Virgin of Charity, one of the two most visible devotions in Cuban popular religion. The identification did not erase either figure for its devotees; it let one public image carry a saint's sanction and an orisha's own history of exile and mercy at once, in a colonial religious landscape where openly worshipping the orisha alone carried real risk.