One Religion, Two Names, and a History of Forced Concealment

The religion itutu serves reached Cuba through the transatlantic slave trade, carried by enslaved Yoruba people, and under Spanish colonial rule its practitioners, like enslaved people elsewhere in the Americas, associated their deities, the orishas, with Catholic saints sharing similar attributes or feast days, a pairing that let devotion continue under the outward appearance of Catholic sainthood; the name Santeria itself, meaning roughly the way of the saints, comes directly from this externally imposed and partly protective overlay, which is why many initiated practitioners today prefer to call the tradition Lucumi or the Regla de Ocha instead, names that describe the Yoruba derived religion on its own terms rather than through the colonial era Catholic association.

The religion in Cuba and the religion as practiced in Nigeria and among the Yoruba diaspora more broadly share a common origin but have developed distinctly for well over a century under different conditions, and comparing them directly can understate how much each has developed its own structure. What itutu specifically requires of an initiated priest's funeral, the divinatory questions asked, and what is done with the priest's ritual implements and their accumulated sacred materials, are determined and carried out by initiated elders within the tradition according to knowledge restricted to initiates, and this entry accordingly describes the rite's existence and purpose without setting out procedures that belong to that restricted knowledge.