A Kongo-Derived Religion of the Americas

Palo Monte, also called simply Palo or Las Reglas de Congo, is an African diaspora religion that took shape in Cuba among enslaved people carried from the Kongo region of Central Africa. Its name, meaning roughly "stick of the forest," points to the ritual importance of wood, plants and the wild, and its vocabulary preserves many words of Kikongo and other Bantu languages.

Unlike the Yoruba-derived Santeria with which it often coexists, Palo draws its cosmology from BaKongo religion: a high creator God, usually named Nzambi (Nzambi a Mpungu), who is remote from daily affairs, and a dense world of nature-powers and the spirits of the dead through whom practitioners actually work. The religion developed in the plantation society of nineteenth-century Cuba and within the mutual-aid cabildos into which Africans of common origin were grouped, and it later spread through migration to other parts of the Caribbean and to the United States. Practitioners are called paleros or nganguleros, and the tradition is transmitted through initiation into ritual houses (ramas) rather than through scripture. Reflecting the conditions of its birth under slavery and suspicion, Palo has historically guarded its knowledge closely.