Baba Who? Babalú!

Years ago, I wrote about a Matanzas lineage in which Babalú-Ayé is taken on a ritual journey before he is given to a new devotee. First, he goes to the cemetery, where he is fed a guinea with white wine and cigar smoke. Then he is taken to the foot of a ceiba, where the feeding is repeated. Finally, he returns to the house, where he eats again with the ancestors. Cemetery. Ceiba. House. At the time, I was interested primarily in what this sequence revealed about Babalú’s relationship with the dead. But the ceiba keeps appearing. Dasojí—the father of the Babalú-Ayés—is imagined reclining against the trunk of a ceiba, surrounded by his children. Nanú, their mother, lives in its crown. Naná Burukú receives two white guineas at its foot at dawn. And Babalú himself goes there before entering the house of a new devotee. These are not all versions of the same ceremony. They come from different houses, different stories, different ritual contexts. Still, the pattern is difficult to ignore. The...