Core tenet of Santería / Lucumí
The egun come first.
No orisha is greeted before the ancestors — the dead of the lineage open every ceremony.
Understanding it — context, not catechism: how this passage is held
Egun — the ancestors — are addressed before the orisha in every ceremony, and the reasoning is genealogical: the dead are the closer relatives and the ones through whom the tradition arrived. Practitioners maintain a shrine for them, typically apart from the orisha shrines, and consult them first. In a religion carried across the Atlantic by enslaved people, honoring those who carried it is not incidental to the theology.
The same ground, other faiths
claims that share this one's ideas
The samskaras — life, marked.
Hinduism · rite
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Merit is real, and it can be given away.
Buddhism
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Counting the Omer, and the fires of Lag BaOmer.
Judaism · rite
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The dead are not out of reach.
Christianity
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Ziyarat — visiting the dead.
Islam · rite
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Water thrown the wrong way.
Sikhism · story
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