Can someone tell me something about the religion "Santeria"?

Answer 1

Santeria is structured just like the Catholic Church. With the same results; the membership worships Church authority instead of the original diety. What else is new?

Answer 2

Santeria is a religion practiced in Southern Florida, Cuba, and other places where Spanish Catholics brought African slaves to the new world. These people had been kidnapped from West Africa, but they brought their ways of religion with them. They believed that underneath one great deity were many underdeities that represented different elements of the world and of life: wood, fire, iron, love, war, agriculture, etc. To these underdeities prayer was offered in exchange for assistance.

Their Catholic masters forbade the practice of their religion, so they masked the identities of these underdeities, "orishas," behind particular Catholic saints, getting under the radar of the slavedrivers.

Worship in this tradition takes place in small group settings where sacrifices of small animals, plants, and other things lead up, often, to a possession of sorts where an orisha "rides" the priest or priestess presiding. The orisha then speaks to the people present through the priest or priestess.

If you want to know more, I highly suggest "Santeria: The Beliefs and Rituals of a Growing Religion in America," by Miguel A. De La Torre.

Answer 3

the way of the saints, or la regla de la ocha, believe in powerful spirits, who like the catholic saints, were once human beings who were made worthy, when alive to posess powers over the forces of nature, they became godlike, and are referred to as the orixas. They also believe in a creator God, named oludamare, who after creating the universe, and appointing the orixas, left us to create other universes

Answer 4

It is a west African Yoruban Religion. Pretty good reading!!! Read here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santer%C3%ADa