My Dear, Most Cherished Readers.
For 2 years, I have been putting out CINTRA WILSON FEELS YOUR PAIN every Tuesday.
You may have noticed that I have finally turned on a payment option.
I’ve been writing professionally for 36 years. I literally have no other marketable skill set.
In case you didn’t know it, writers are second-class citizens these days. I used to be able to make a living at it, but since 2007, my income has literally dropped by 90%. I am, I am sorry to report, a broke-dick motherfucker.
So, if you’re comfortably able, I am officially begging you to consider subscribing monthly or yearly or whatever works for you, because I really, genuinely need the money.
If you’re hard up yourself, please continue to enjoy CWFYP gratis, with all of my love.
Thank you with all of my heart for your readership. I live for it.
XXXCW
In the late eighties, the ravaging AIDS epidemic was the backdrop for a sudden blossoming of paganism in San Francisco.
I took a lot of Afro-Haitian and Afro-Brazilian dance classes at San Francisco State, which invoked certain snaky African Gods. I lived in the Mission District where 7-day saint candles and plastic bottles of holy water were sold.
“Congo Phil,” one of the dance class drummers, once gave me a silver charm and a small ritual to protect me against HIV when he heard my ex had it. Another friend of mine had become active in Santeria after receiving an HIV-positive diagnosis.
In Los Angeles in 1994, a psychologist suggested that I envision a guardian angel. What rose spontaneously into my thoughts was Nadine, a heavyset black woman in a white off-the-shoulder dress, white headwrap and full skirt, and multiple strands of beads. Why this particular imagery came into my mind I couldn’t say, because I had no particular associations with it. She came to mind, and I worked with that idea.
When I was flying on my one-way ticket to New York to move in 1996,
I found a picture in “Departures” magazine of a Nadine archetype smoking a cigar in the Caribbean, and decided I needed to know more about her culture. I ripped out the photo and have it somewhere still.
I began to read a lot of books on Santeria. The Nadine archetype was known as a “Madama.” They were priestesses.
The one thing I had always liked in my humanities class was the spontaneous eruption of similar archetypes throughout all mankind of a whole essential worker class of deities — patron saints. The Greeks had Gods and Goddesses of events like War and Sunlight and Oceans and Death and Eros — important department heads. That always made sense to me on a strange inner level - the distribution of specific Godly duties - and I was impressed, in a Carl Jung-like way, that these archetypes seemed to persist in every human society, at some point in their development. Santeria impressed me because it was based on Ifa (ee-FAH) — a 5000 year-old African religion that endured slavery, and became (respectively) Vodoun in Haiti, Santeria in Cuba, Candomblé in Brazil. Christianity was forced on the slaves, but Ifa endured, because slaves were able to syncretize their African Gods into the Catholic saint system — they “recognized” the essential energy of the saints as being emanations of the same archetypes they were already working with.
I had a stalker for a while who for years used to contact me regularly, describe my neighborhood, and tell me he was going to shoot me.
When I first moved to New York, I knew he had somehow figured out where I was because, to the friends’ house I was staying in, he sent hundreds of magazine subscriptions. I didn’t know what to do about it, so I was frequenting the local Botanica in the Lower East Side, getting good luck candles and colorful scented oils.
I asked the guys behind the counter if they knew a good babalawõ, or Santeria priest.
“Yeah, there’s a young guy who comes in here sometimes. As a matter of fact, there he is.”
He was a Puerto Rican guy in cowboy boots who looked like a short Eric Estrada. He was doing some kind of complicated ritual with a chain and a half-coconut full of water in front of a statue of St. Lazarus, and chanting in a language that was definitely not Spanish, but which I knew from geeking out on the subject was Yoruban.
I introduced himself, and told him I was looking for a babalawõ. He cheerfully told me he would do a quick reading for me right there.
He threw the chain a few times. I knew the chain had eight flat diamond shapes that had a positive or negative side, and that the Book of Ifa, the African source religion of Santeria (pre-slavery diaspora) was an oracular book of divination via gestalt and geomancy, very much like the Confucian I-Ching.
“Hey,” he said, looking at me with dark eyes of concern. “Is someone trying to hurt you?”
I was so surprised and shocked and relieved I almost burst into tears.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “Make an appointment with me, and we’ll work it out. It will be OK.”
I made an appointment with him for the next day.
Needless to say, I became entangled with him. There was some kind of recognition there, between us - some shimmering energy and kismet there.
Anyway - we did a ritual, and my stalker went away for seven years.
I was having violent trembling panic attacks, and he wrote a prayer on my tongue with his finger, and they went away for seven years.
I started doing all of the very uncomfortable ritual initiations for Santeria — getting my elekes or collares, my beaded necklaces that represented the so-called “Seven African Powers.”
I had some pretty amazing metaphysical experiences. Three or four times I was dreaming in Yoruban scripture. It wasn’t quite like a dream, but it wasn’t reality, either - it was a whole other space in my consciousness that had never been there before.
Sacrificing chickens was a lot to get used to, at first, but made perfect sense in the context of the ceremonies. Sometimes, depending on the ceremony, it was really brutal — one ceremony required that the priest beat a goose to death. But you haven’t lived until you’ve picked the remains of a goose out of a popcorn ceiling.
Right as I was on the verge of getting my Warriors ceremony, my recently ex-ed boyfriend Kevin in LA died. We were supposed to be on a temporary breakup, so I was pretty wrecked about it.
The Santeria priest was a real prince about it. He really helped me get through it. I felt like I was saved by Santeria. I did the Warriors initiation the next day, after finding out. I couldn’t imagine not having Ifa at that moment in my life — I felt like it came to intercept me. My Guardian Angel Nadine had led me to an experience of having support for the worst event of my life. I threw myself all the way in.
After a while, the priest wanted to marry me and have me be his apetebi, or helper. I didn’t want to sign up for that. I had a dream that Orunmila, the figure in Ifa who represents “the intelligence of God,” asked me who I was. At first I said I was nobody, and his reaction told me that it was the wrong answer.
“You should have said, I am an apetebi,” said the priest.
That’s when I knew it was over.
Instead, I had looked at the face of the intelligence of God — a slight darker gentleman who looked kind of like a young Billy Crystal and I said, “I am a writer.”
A rose from my garden. Happy Springtime to all the pagans.
Hire me if you need an editor. Cintraw@gmail.com
Artwork: (in progress) Sister Rosetta Tharpe, oil on canvas, Cintra Wilson 2023.
There seems to be a human tendency (or maybe it's just me) to believe a new religion/hobby/husband is going for Permanence. Capital P. It's so liberating when we realize nothing is permanent, including Life itself.
I think when I married my first husband, I was just trying marriage on for size.
It didn't fit.
You are worth a galleon-full of doubloons. Yuss.
Fascinating revelation about your personal (and obviously striking) experiences with Santeria.
Syncretism in ancient religious systems has always mesmerized me; I have studied it within and without the parameters of academe and it plays a significant role in my own, rather unorthodox spirituality, as well.
The ancient Egyptians, for example, were absolute masters at syncretism within their very own wildly diverse yet thematically unified mythical landscape. It blows the mind to witness the breathtaking ease with which they accommodated their gods, local and national, with such theological ease and, dare I say, panache. They LOVED to operate on that level. Of course, magic in its truest sense was at the heart of the ancient Egyptian system, and this of course is true of Santeria itself. “User-friendly” universes, I like to say.
The fluidity can be breathtaking and is a testament to human adaptability in the metaphysical sphere. Only Roman Catholicism, among the systems that emerged from the super-tribalistic Abrahamic-based monotheistic religions, lent itself to the beauty of syncretism. Islam, Judaism, and Eastern Orthodoxy do not, though saint/angel-cults exist in all of those systems, to some extent or another, especially Orthodoxy.
There’s also a curious link between religious systems bolstered by invasive imperialistic proselytism and the flourishing of syncretic faiths/rites like those of Santeria, in my opinion: where an empire forces its pantheon of gods/angels/saints upon local systems, the people are empowered to throw-off such shackles by syncretizing, yet at the same time they retain whatever is enriching from the newer system and jettison what doesn’t “fit” e.g. oppressive legalism of ritual and praxis.
Again, I think it’s a brilliant testament to the versatility and stubbornness of the human spirit in a wholly positive way. How awesome that Santeria found its way to you through the veils and shadows … and you found the wherewithal to answer the summons. Great and revealing piece, Wilson. May Nadine embrace you unceasingly!
To the doubters, that’s cool, but there are more things in heaven and on the earth, Horatio(s). 😁