Bodies of Water

Atlantic Ocean

Also Known As Atlantic · The Atlantic

Oceans

Citation Formats

General Reference

Divinity Atlas. "Atlantic Ocean." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://divinity.interactivelion.com/bodies-of-water/atlantic-ocean.

APA Style

Divinity Atlas. (n.d.). Atlantic Ocean. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://divinity.interactivelion.com/bodies-of-water/atlantic-ocean

BibTeX

@misc{divinityatlas-atlantic-ocean,
  author = {Divinity Atlas},
  title = {Atlantic Ocean},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://divinity.interactivelion.com/bodies-of-water/atlantic-ocean},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

The Atlantic Ocean separates the Americas from Europe and Africa, and in religious history it is less a place than a passage. The transatlantic slave trade carried West and Central African traditions to Brazil, Cuba, Haiti and the American South, where they were remade as Candomble, Santeria, Vodou and their relatives, and the atlas holds those diaspora forms as a region of their own. The same ocean carried European Christianity west in the colonial missions, and the Puritan settlers who crossed it read their voyage through the book of Exodus.

Facts

Origins

Origin Region

The ocean lying between the Americas to the west and Europe and Africa to the east, second largest of the world's oceans, and in religious history a passage rather than a place. 3

Region

Bordered by the Americas, Europe and Africa. The slaving ports on its eastern side, Ouidah in Benin and Elmina and Cape Coast in Ghana among them, are visited as memorial sites today, and Matory argues that the traffic in religious ideas ran both ways, with nineteenth century returnees from Brazil and Cuba helping shape the Yoruba-centred practice later carried west again. 2

Significance

Sacred Rolethe subject's own account

Not a cult object in itself, but read through the cosmologies carried across it. In Kongo thought, as Fu-Kiau sets it out, kalunga is the water boundary dividing the world of the living from the world of the dead, and the ocean crossing has been read through that line in the study of Kongo-derived traditions in the Americas. 1

Attributions

Associated Religion

The African diaspora traditions formed on its western shore, Candomble in Brazil, Lucumi or Santeria in Cuba and Vodou in Haiti among them; the Catholic and Protestant Christianity carried west by European colonisation and mission; and the Islam long established on its West African coast. 2

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A Religion Carried in People's Memories

The Atlantic's place in religious history is as a passage rather than a place, and the most consequential thing it carried was a population that arrived with nothing but what it could remember.

Between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries something over twelve million people were shipped from West and West Central Africa to the Americas. They travelled without their shrines, their ritual objects, their lineages or, in most cases, their priests, and they arrived among people from other regions speaking other languages. What could be rebuilt on the far side had to be rebuilt from memory, in company, under conditions designed to prevent exactly that.

It was rebuilt. Candomble in Brazil, Santeria or Lucumi in Cuba, Vodou in Haiti, Winti in Suriname, Obeah and Myal in the anglophone Caribbean, and the conjure traditions of the southern United States all descend from that reassembly, and each preserves an identifiable weighting of origins: Yoruba practice heaviest where Yoruba captives arrived latest and in greatest numbers, Fon and Ewe in Haiti, Kongo widely.

Catholic baptism was required in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies and the saints supplied a second vocabulary that allowed practice to continue in plain sight. Whether that identification was camouflage, genuine devotion or both at once is argued by practitioners as well as scholars, and the answer differs by place and by generation.

The Same Ocean, Read as Exodus

The Atlantic was crossed in the other direction by people who understood the voyage itself in scriptural terms, and who wrote about it at length.

English Puritans sailing to New England in the 1630s described themselves as crossing a sea out of bondage into a wilderness on the way to a promised land, and the Exodus frame shaped the colonies they founded, their covenanted congregations, their reading of hardship as chastisement, and their sense of being watched. The same imagery was later taken up in a very different mouth: enslaved Christians in North America and the Caribbean read Exodus as being about themselves and not about their owners, and the spirituals that came out of that reading are among the clearest evidence anywhere of a text being reclaimed against the people who supplied it.

The ocean also carried revival. The transatlantic preaching circuits of the eighteenth century, with George Whitefield crossing repeatedly, made the Great Awakening a phenomenon on both sides at once, connected by printed sermons and newspaper reports moving on the same ships. In the nineteenth century the traffic was mission: British and American societies sending personnel and money out along Atlantic routes to West Africa and beyond.

The result is an ocean that carried Christianity west, Africans west, and then, in the twentieth century, African-founded and African American churches back east and north, so the direction of religious influence has reversed at least twice.

Cross-Tradition Connections