What the Name Orisha Covers

Frances Henry's ethnography of Trinidad worship favors the term Orisha over the more commonly heard Shango, and the distinction matters. Shango names one orisha, the deified king of Oyo who holds thunder and rough justice, and Trinidadians came to use his name loosely for the whole religion in much the way outsiders once called the entire Cuban tradition Santeria after its saint pairings rather than by its own name, Lucumi or Regla de Ocha. The atlas follows the scholarship's preferred term while recording Shango as the name most people actually use.

Structurally, Trinidad's Orisha tradition shares the core Yoruba diaspora pattern also present in Lucumi and Candomble: a distant supreme creator, addressed here as Olodumare, is not the object of direct cult, and the practical business of religion runs through the orisha and through ancestors, both approached by initiated practitioners. What sets the Trinidadian formation apart from its Cuban and Brazilian cousins is its parallel and often overlapping relationship with the Spiritual Baptist faith, a separate Christian derived tradition that colonial law suppressed under the same ordinances and that many Orisha practitioners have also belonged to, producing a religious landscape in Trinidad with more direct Protestant Christian entanglement than either Lucumi's Catholic saint pairings or Candomble's Catholic syncretism.