Orishas

The Orishas are nature-linked divine beings in the Yoruba religion, represented in the novel through Cuban Santería as powers that shape human life, ritual, and interpretation. They appear both in a public ceremony in Havana, where dance and percussion make their elemental associations visible, and in Rodrigo Lerbier’s divination, where Chango delivers a warning about a supernatural stone. These scenes present the Orishas not simply as names in a belief system but as figures through whom characters understand community, danger, and spiritual allegiance.

Nature, Divinity, and Human Need

Manuel explains that the Orishas are demi-gods connected to nature and sent to earth by Olorun, the supreme divinity, to help human beings. The account gives their presence a practical as well as cosmological dimension: worshippers appeal to them for purification, love, or protection from death. Calls for Ashé express a related idea, identifying it as the universe’s spiritual energy. In this religious vocabulary, natural forces and human concerns are not separate domains; ritual gives people a way to address them together.

The ceremony Loïc and Laurence attend in Havana organizes this understanding around four figures. Yemaya is associated with water; Oya with air and wind; Chango with fire, lightning, and war; and Osun, also called Oshun, with earth, female sexuality, and fertility. Oshun is also associated with the Virgin of Charity of El Cobre, Cuba’s patron saint, whose statue is prominently displayed in the cathedral of Cardenas. That connection places a Yoruba deity and a Christian figure in relation without making them identical: the novel presents their association as part of the religious world Manuel explains.

The Havana Ceremony

The ceremony takes place in a popular neighborhood in Havana on the evening of March 20. Manuel brings Loïc and Laurence there after arranging to meet them at the entrance to Colon Cemetery, invoking Oya’s guardianship of cemetery gates as part of the introduction. A crowd has already gathered in a street, where sacred bata drums accompany a dancer representing Yemaya. The instruments are treated as capable of communicating with the divinities, and the performance unfolds before an audience that includes tourists as well as local participants.

Other dancers embody the Orishas in turn. Oya wears a multicolored, mainly yellow-and-blue dress; Chango appears in red and gold, with energetic movements associated with lightning and war; Oshun wears yellow and white and is presented with an exuberant association with fertility and sexual pleasure. Their costumes and choreography make the elemental identities legible to spectators. Loïc connects the sequence to his earlier reading of Bachelard and to his own youthful poems about the elements, but the dance’s force for him lies in its dynamic combination of matter, energy, and life. The figures do not remain isolated symbols: they enter, succeed one another, and intermingle in a continuing performance.

The scene is festive and accessible rather than secret. Someone passes a hat among the audience, and Manuel quietly explains the deities, the drums, and the choreography. Although the gathering may seem improvised, its actions follow Yoruba ritual. The novel thus places public sociability and prescribed religious practice side by side: the event is welcoming to outsiders, yet its form retains a specific ceremonial order. Loïc’s curiosity and amusement outweigh his unease about the pagan character of what he sees, even as he recalls Régis’s disapproval.

Chango and the Divination of the Stone

A different encounter with the Orishas occurs when Rodrigo, a babalao and Manuel’s cousin, consults the Ifa oracle about the cameo. Rodrigo has placed the object before him, set palm nuts on his divination tray, and closed his eyes to seek the verdict of the Orishas. In the vision that follows, Chango appears amid infernal flames and warns that the stone belongs to the forces of evil. The warning, as Rodrigo experiences it, is that the object can enable a vast power to transform reality in the hands of someone able to control it, but can destroy someone who cannot.

Chango’s message also gives Rodrigo a condition for keeping the stone in a Yoruba place of worship: offerings must always be nearby, preferably human or at least animal. This is the vision’s claim, not an independently established rule of the faith. Earlier, Rodrigo had described the stone to a Catholic priest as concentrating harmful energies, like a lightning rod, and proposed putting it in quarantine. The priest, wary of African-derived rites but shaped by Cuban respect for older beliefs, allows Rodrigo to enter the house; members of the crowd also greet the babalao with deference. The episode sets Catholic and Santería authorities in wary proximity, while showing that people in the community regard both as consequential.

Rodrigo’s Changing Interpretation

Rodrigo initially sees the stone’s power as something that might be used to the advantage of Santería and its adherents. He imagines exhibiting it as a votive offering in his Havana temple and believes that, properly controlled, it could give him extraordinary power. Chango’s vision unsettles that ambition by recasting the object as dangerous and demanding. The Orishas in this episode therefore enter the story through a personal act of divination whose implications reach beyond Rodrigo’s private beliefs.

Later, Rodrigo tells Loïc that his conversations with Aurelio have made him question the direction of his life and his commitment to Santería. He says he has come to understand the voices he took for Yoruba oracles as the voice of Satan. This is Rodrigo’s changed religious judgment, formed through Aurelio’s influence and experience; it does not erase the earlier ceremony’s communal meaning or establish that every character shares his conclusion. His conflict is also social: as a prominent babalao in Cuba, respected and feared, he cannot easily abandon an institution in which he holds an important position. The Orishas consequently stand at the center of an unresolved divide between ritual authority, personal conviction, and Rodrigo’s developing Christian faith.