Palo Monte

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.

The heart of Palo practice is the nganga (also prenda or nkisi), a consecrated iron cauldron or vessel packed with earth, sticks, herbs and other materials, at whose centre stands a bond with the spirit of a specific dead person, the nfumbi. Through this pact the palero enters a reciprocal relationship: the spirit is fed, honoured and housed, and in return it works on the practitioner's behalf in matters of healing, protection, divination and the resolution of conflict. The wider unseen world is populated by the mpungu, great nature-powers analogous to, and often syncretised with, the orichas of Santeria and Catholic saints, each associated with forces such as thunder, iron, the sea or the cemetery.

Divination is commonly performed with a set of shells or coconut discs. Palo is organised into several branches or ramas, chiefly Mayombe, Briyumba (Brillumba) and Kimbisa, which differ in emphasis, in the degree of Christian and other influence they admit, and in ritual detail; Kimbisa in particular openly incorporates Catholic and Espiritismo elements. Because its power is real and morally double-edged in practitioners' own understanding, Palo has often been sensationalised by outsiders as sorcery, a characterisation its adherents reject.

One enters Palo through an initiation known as rayamiento ("scratching"), in which the body is marked and the initiate is bound to the house, its spirits and its ranked hierarchy of tata and yaya (father and mother of the religion). Ritual life centres on the nganga and on gatherings marked by drumming, song in a Kikongo-influenced ritual language, and possession by the dead.

Many practitioners are also initiated in Santeria and regard the two systems as complementary rather than competing, a Cuban pattern in which Palo handles certain kinds of work and the oricha religion others; both have long coexisted with popular Catholicism. Following the Cuban migrations of the twentieth century, Palo established communities in the United States, especially Florida, New York and New Jersey, and elsewhere in Latin America, and it continues to be practised in Cuba itself.

Scholars treat it as one of the major Afro-Cuban religions, alongside Santeria (Regla de Ocha) and the Abakua society, and as an important surviving expression of Kongo religious thought in the Americas. Reliable membership figures do not exist, both because of the tradition's secrecy and because affiliation is defined by initiation into particular houses rather than by any central body.