02Knights Templar - Julian Emperor

SAINTS
its consequences have been enormous. However, one of the
strangest and perhaps most unexpected was the creation of
what could be termed a whole new religion. West Africans
taken from their homelands to work in the sugar plantations
of the Caribbean were also made to convert to Catholicism
and forced to abandon their own traditional beliefs and religious
practices. Clearly, such oppression often has the effect
of forcing ideas and practices underground and, rather than
give up their own rituals and religions, slave communities
simply disguised them.
Traditional West African religions involved the worship of
nature and deities termed as ‘orishas’. The slaves brought to
work on plantations appeared to embrace the Roman Catholic
religion of their owners but, in fact, continued their own religious
practices.They simply substituted public reverence for
the pantheon of Catholic saints for the worship of their own
gods.When slaves seemed to be celebrating the feast days of
the saints it was, in fact, a front for the worship of orishas.This
bias in favour of devotion to the saints was recognised by slave
owners who termed their worship as ‘Santeria’. It is an insulting
term intended to describe forms of Catholicism that
overemphasise the importance of the saints. Within
Christianity in general, the saints are not, of course, viewed as
greater than God and they are not to be worshipped as Gods
or false idols. Arguably, the development of Santeria was far
from the first time that Christianity had been merged with elements
of pre-Christian religions. An interesting earlier example
is the popularity of the pre-Christian fertility figure of
the Green Man whose image appears in many Western medieval
churches.
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