Much has been said about the African origins of Orixá worship, and rightly so. Honouring the roots is an act of dignity, a movement of memory and an act of repair in the face of all that was silenced for so long.
Honouring the roots
Learning about Africa's spiritual diversity, understanding its contexts and recognising historical violence and erasure is not merely an intellectual exercise: it is an act of respect for those who came before us.
African men and women were forced across the ocean, deprived of their lands, names, languages and autonomy. Still, something essential remained alive—something even brutal violence could not erase.
The sacred found a way.
The flower is sacred too
What flourished in Brazil was not born from an absence of tradition. It was born from tradition's strength—from the deeply spiritual human capacity to continue even when everything seemed to have been torn away.
Tradition is not fixed stone. Tradition is a living seed. Had it remained motionless, it might not have survived. Adaptation made continuity possible. Transformation secured its presence.
Amid colonial violence, forced displacement and encounters among different peoples, new ways of praying, singing, drumming, dancing and invoking the unseen found space to emerge. This does not erase violence or turn pain into beauty. It recognises the magnitude of the human response to it.
We are not a copy
We are continuity.
Seeking the root should not invalidate the flower, just as celebrating the flower does not make us forget where its nourishment comes from. There is immense beauty in what was recreated and co-created in Brazil.
In the understanding that guides our house, purity is not the central value. Vitality is. What carries axé continues. What does not, disappears. If these traditions have crossed centuries and still pulse today, it was not by accident. It was through strength.
Caring for the whole tree
Perhaps our time does not ask us to choose between root and flower. Perhaps it asks something greater: that we care for the whole tree.
May we study origins without turning history into a prison. May we honour inheritance without denying the paths that opened.
Tradition is not repeating the past. It is allowing the ancestral to keep happening in the present.
And it continues. In every drumbeat. In every prayer. In every body that turns. In every house that takes root.
Between root and flower there is life. And it is this life that we continue to honour.