Description

A genuine initiate’s account of one of the most maligned and misunderstood traditions in the Afro-Cuban sorcerous current. At the heart of Palo Mayombe lies the prenda — a cauldron containing a human skull or bones, reanimated by living spirit — and this is the most comprehensive study of the tradition to date, written from within the cult itself and drawing on rare materials, pamphlets, booklets, and unpublished field notes.

Nicholaj de Mattos Frisvold traces Palo Mayombe’s roots back through Kongolese sorcery, the warrior and leopard societies, and the disruptive impact of the Portuguese Mission — following the original African faith across the Middle Passage and its flowering in Cuba as a New World Creole religion. Frisvold draws illuminating parallels with ancient Greek necromancy and nigromancy and the wider Western grimoire tradition, showing what has been lost in the modern denial of the dead and the cult of the ancestors — the magical head in its three-legged iron cauldron finding echoes in Odin, Baphomet, Bran, John the Baptist, and Orpheus alike.

This is a serious, dignified study that confronts the tradition’s genuinely sinister and violent dimensions without descending into lurid sensationalism — a complete living system embracing both the arts of healing and resurrection and those that take life away.

Bound in grey cloth boards with the firma of Centella blocked in bone white to the front, 240 pages, with four tipped-in colour plates of the author’s own prendas and the hand-rendered firmas/signatures of the principal spirits in pen and ink. Printed on 150gsm paper.