Babalú-Ayé

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Before the sun is up on the seventeenth of December, the road into El Rincón is already full. A man moves along it on his knees, a cinder block chained to one ankle, dragging the weight of it through the dust toward a small white church a kilometer off; beside him another goes flat on his back, pushing himself feet-first by his heels, and both are dressed in the same rough sackcloth and the same royal purple. They have come to keep a promise. The question a stranger might ask — and the one the tradition answers two ways at once — is whose promise it is: made to the lame beggar of a Gospel parable, the one whose sores the dogs came to lick, or to the old king of the earth who sends the smallpox and, being thanked, lifts it away.

The name it is dangerous to say

Babalú-Ayé is the orisha of disease and of the healing of it. Smallpox is his, and epidemic, and the skin’s sores and inflammations, the plague and the fever that is his own heat working in a body; and beneath and beyond all of these, the earth itself is his. He is the lord who both sends the sickness and lifts it, and because he stands at that hinge he walks always close to Ikú, the force that takes life. This is his character in the Regla de Ocha, the Afro-Cuban religion also called la Regla Lucumí, or simply la religión — a tradition served today across Cuba and its diaspora, whose priests, the santeros and santeras and the babalawos, keep him.

He is the Cuban and Lucumí form of a West African power the priests name openly. In the Yoruba homeland he is Obalúayé — a name read as “king, lord of the earth” — and also Ṣọpọna, or Shopona, the owner of smallpox, and Omolú, and Oluaye. Among the Fon of Dahomey the same power is Sakpata. The Cuban Arará line, descended from Dahomean captives, preserves him under his own name as Asojano, or Asojuano, with his elders Naná Burukú and Dasoyí standing behind him. These African roots — the Yoruba and Fon peoples, their orisha religion, the elder powers around him — belong to their own histories and are named here only in passing; what the Cuban record documents is the crossing, and the figure the island made.

The name Babalú-Ayé is itself a Lucumí rendering, glossed as “Father, Lord of the Earth,” from the Yoruba baba, father, and ayé, the world or the earth. It is a name approached with care. To speak the smallpox-king’s true name, the tradition holds, is to call him, and one does not lightly summon the power that carries the pox; so he is addressed with awe and by circumlocution, through praise-names and honorifics rather than the plain word. One of the praise-names the ethnographers set down for him is Alápa-dúpé — “one who kills and is thanked for it,” as the Wikipedia account of the orisha records the gloss. The phrase holds his whole paradox in four words. He is not a malevolent power; he is the one whose visitation, even at its most terrible, ends in gratitude.

How this power reached Cuba is the part of the story the documentary record can follow. Across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Atlantic slave trade carried Lucumí, Arará, and Kongo peoples to the island in enormous numbers, and with them their devotions. In the colonial cabildos de nación — the mutual-aid brotherhoods into which the enslaved and the free were organized by African “nation” — those devotions were kept alive and reassembled, and under the pressure of a Catholic slave society the smallpox-and-earth lord was laid alongside the ulcered, dog-attended image of San Lázaro. That larger history of the trade and the cabildos belongs to the Afro-Cubans and to the Lucumí as peoples, and is told at length in their entries; what matters for the orisha is that he came through the Middle Passage intact enough to be recognized on the far shore.

How intact is a genuine question, and scholars answer it differently. How much of the West African cult of Ṣọpọna survived the crossing whole, and how much was remade on Cuban ground into something new, is contested; the degree of Yoruba retention against island creolization is one of the standing debates of the field. The tradition itself is comfortable with variance where the academy looks for a single answer. The priests distinguish plainly between the Lucumí and the Arará forms of the orisha, and they say that his caminos — his roads or avatars — along with his elders and his offerings, differ from one house to the next and one rama, one lineage-branch, to another. There is no single canonical Babalú-Ayé to be recovered, only a family of him.

The lord who sends and lifts

The tradition imagines him old and lame. He leans on a pair of crutches; his ruined skin is hidden under sackcloth and under the mariwó, the fringe of raffia palm that veils him, and his dogs attend him, licking at the sores he cannot heal on himself. His emblem is the já — a small broom bound from the ribs of the palm and strung with cowries, with which his priests sweep sickness and bad air off the surface of a body, brushing the affliction away. It is a working tool as much as a symbol: the gesture of cleaning a person of what clings to them.

A popular image of San Lázaro — the face Babalú-Ayé wears in Cuba — on his crutches with the two dogs, one of the most beloved devotions of the island’s popular religiosity. Vanelyazul, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

His sacred colors are the burlap of the sackcloth and a royal purple shaded toward earth-tones — what some devotees call the colors of a bruise, the mottling of a body that has been struck. His number is seventeen. In the diloggún, the reading of cowrie shells, he is strongly tied to the throw of thirteen shells, the sign the tradition names Metanlá; in the more closed system of Ifá he is associated with the odu Ojuani Meyi and Iretè Meyi. These divinatory ties, like the readings that would draw on them, are matters for the initiated priesthood and are set down here only at the ethnographer’s distance — described, never taught, and in any case variable from house to house.

His place in the pantheon is likewise given differently by different lineages. Many houses make him a son of Yemayá, the mother of the sea, and so a brother of Changó, the thunder-king; others tell him as a child, or a husband, of the elder Naná Burukú, the old power of still and swampy water from whom his own line partly descends. Across the tellings he is bound tightly to Osain, the orisha of the wild herbs of the forest and of their medicine — the one who knows the leaf that answers the fever — which is only fitting for a lord who is himself both the disease and the cure. The pantheon does not resolve his kinship into one chart, and the tradition does not ask it to.

In Cuba the face he wears is San Lázaro’s, and the faithful serve him above all for health — for a sick child, a wound that will not close, a diagnosis feared or a recovery owed. The vessels in which his priests keep his secrets are pierced through with holes, in the pattern the pox leaves on skin, so that the very sign of his affliction becomes the sign of his mercy; the wound and the blessing are made the same shape. The rites by which he is seated in a devotee’s head, the offerings and the divination that disclose his will, are named here only from the outside, as the ethnographic and public record names them, and never as instruction. What can be said plainly is the shape of the devotion: a power feared for what he carries and loved for what he can take away, approached with the humility owed to something that could as easily kill.

The beggar and the bishop

The saint whose image he borrowed is himself two men the Church has never fully managed to keep apart, and the confusion is old and instructive. The San Lázaro whom Cubans love — the one on the crutches, his legs open with sores, the two dogs at his feet — is the beggar Lazarus of Jesus’ parable in Luke 16:19–31, who lay at the rich man’s gate covered in ulcers that the dogs came to lick, and who was carried after death into Abraham’s bosom. That Lazarus was never canonized in this guise; he is a figure of a story, not a saint of the calendar. The saint the Church officially honors is San Lázaro Obispo — Lazarus of Bethany, the friend of Jesus raised from four days’ death and later, by tradition, the first bishop of Marseille — who is properly shown without wounds, robed and mitered in the dignity of his office. Popular devotion fused the poor leper of the parable with the smallpox-and-earth orisha and hung the whole of it on the bishop’s feast, and the clergy have at times tried, without much success, to prise the true bishop loose from the beggar the people actually kneel to. As one Cuban account of the devotion puts it, the Church never sanctified the beggar of the parable at all; the only saint of the name is the bishop, who appears in the images without a single wound. The image the pilgrims carry is the one the Church did not authorize.

The place where the promise is paid is the Santuario Nacional de San Lázaro at El Rincón, on the southern edge of Havana in the town of Santiago de las Vegas, and its ground is a leprosarium — which is why the orisha of the sores found a home there. The story reaches back to the old Hospital de San Lázaro of the capital, chartered as a royal hospital by decree of Felipe V on the nineteenth of June 1714 and given, by 1781, a walled masonry lazaretto at the Caleta that took the saint’s name. As the city grew out to meet it, the leprosarium was moved: by the documented chronology of the hospital, its patients were transferred out through 1916 and 1917 to a new complex at El Rincón, where a church to San Lázaro was raised and inaugurated in February 1917. The old hospital survives behind the sanctuary still, as a specialist center for diseases of the skin, since named for the Cuban dermatologist Guillermo Fernández Hernández-Baquero; the church itself was declared a national sanctuary in the 1990s. The lord of the pox is served, fittingly, beside a hospital of the skin.

The December 17 pilgrimage for the feast of San Lázaro, when tens of thousands come to El Rincón to fulfill their vows. Vanelyazul, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Each seventeenth of December the caminata to El Rincón draws tens of thousands. They come to fulfill a promesa, a vow made for a healing asked or received, and the hardest of them keep it in the flesh: walking the last kilometers barefoot, crawling on their knees or their backs, dragging concrete blocks or stones chained to their legs, hauling crosses, robed in the sackcloth and purple that are the orisha’s own. The Smithsonian’s account of the procession describes a devotion that is at once Catholic and Afro-Cuban, San Lázaro and Babalú-Ayé addressed in one breath, and the crowds that Cuban reporting counts each year — thousands converging on the sanctuary of El Rincón to ask and to give thanks — make it the second most visited shrine in the country, after only the basilica of El Cobre and its yellow Virgin in the east.

That the pilgrimage endured is itself part of the record. Through the decades of the Revolution’s official atheism, from the early 1960s into the early 1990s, the walk to El Rincón was made anyway, at real cost to those who made it publicly; the constitutional turn of 1992, which redefined the state as secular rather than atheist, widened the room for it, and the crowds have grown since. The devotion did not wait for permission.

The documentary recovery of the orisha behind the saint rests largely on Cuban scholars, and they are best read with their virtues and their limits both in view. Lydia Cabrera’s El Monte, published in 1954, remains the foundational field record of Regla de Ocha and of the powers around Babalú-Ayé; Cabrera worked from the testimony of practitioners and died in 1991, an exile, with the book long since a classic. Natalia Bolívar Aróstegui and Miguel Barnet carried the ethnography forward. Standing behind them all is Fernando Ortiz, who gave the study of Cuba the word transculturación — the idea of two cultures meeting and making a third between them — and who, in the same career, trafficked in the “brujería” caricature, casting Afro-Cuban religion as witchcraft in his early work. Both things are true of him, and the critical weighing of that founding ethnography belongs to the account of the Afro-Cubans.

For the slander has clung to Babalú-Ayé as tightly as to any orisha, and it must be named to be refused. The old man on the crutches, the dogs, the sackcloth, the animal offering made to a lord of the earth — all of it has been dressed up for two centuries as “voodoo,” “black magic,” “Satanism,” “brujería,” and the sacrifice sensationalized into horror by outsiders who never troubled to learn what it meant. That framing is a distortion, not a description, and this account has no use for it. What the sackcloth actually covers is a theology of the body: that sickness and health come from one source, that the power which wounds is the power to be thanked, and that the mark of the affliction, punched into a clay vessel as a ring of small holes, can be turned into the mark of mercy. The scholars debate, and rightly, how much of the San Lázaro devotion was ever camouflage worn to survive a Catholic order and how much became, over the generations, a sincerely doubled faith in which the beggar-saint and the earth-lord are two true names held at once. That is the live and interesting question; the flattening answers — that he is “really” only the saint, or that the saint is “only” a disguise — both miss him.

The vessels his priests keep are pierced through with holes, in the pattern the pox leaves behind. What marks the sickness is made to mark the cure, and the wound and the mercy come out the same shape. On the seventeenth of December the man who has dragged his block the length of the road reaches the church door at last and is lifted to his feet, his promise kept. Whether the old man he thanks there is a beggar out of Luke or the king of the earth on his crutches, the two have long since learned to answer to a single name.

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