Lucumi practice is built around the orisha, spelled oricha in Cuba, and around a compact working pantheon rather than the hundreds named in West Africa. Elegua opens and closes every road and is addressed first. Ogun holds iron and force, Ochosi the hunt and justice, Obatala clarity and restraint, Yemaya the sea and motherhood, Ochun the river, sweetness and money, Chango thunder and virility, Oya the wind and the cemetery gate, Babalu Aye disease and its cure. Above them stands Olodumare, remote and uncultivated. The orisha are seated in consecrated stones and shells kept in lidded vessels, fed and cared for by the priest whose orisha they are.
The pairing with Catholic saints is the feature outsiders notice first and misread most often. Enslaved Cubans were required to be baptised and to observe the church calendar, and open African worship was punishable. Attaching each orisha to a saint whose image, colours or feast day carried a plausible resemblance made it possible to keep the calendar, honour the orisha in public, and answer any question about what was being done. Chango, a male thunder deity, was attached to Santa Barbara, whose iconography includes a sword and a tower struck by lightning; Babalu Aye, associated with epidemic disease and healing, to Saint Lazarus covered in sores.
Practitioners usually describe these as masks rather than equations, but how far the correspondence goes is a real internal question rather than a settled one. Some Cuban houses treat the Catholic elements as fully part of the religion, keeping images, prayers and mass attendance. Others regard them as camouflage that has outlived its purpose and have stripped them out, aligning practice with Nigerian usage. The name of the religion is caught in the same argument, since Santeria names precisely the layer some houses want removed.