Siete Rayos

Also Known As: also Nsasi, Nsazi, Mukiamamuilo, Nsasi Munalembe; Spanish for “seven lightning bolts”; Nsasi from Kikongo nzazi, “lightning”
Region/Culture: Mesoamerica and the Caribbean
Mythos: Caribbean Mythology, Bantu/Congo Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: Sovereign over lightning, thunder and fire, and over the heat that drives virility, quarrel and sudden justice.
Role in Mythos: One of the two great powers a Palo priest must receive before he can initiate anyone else, so that the religion’s oaths are sworn in his presence.
Relation to Humans: He is fed and spoken to directly, in a cauldron kept in the house, and he answers with weather, luck, court verdicts and trouble for enemies. He is also understood to be dangerous to his own people, quick to punish a broken word or a neglected pot.

The royal palm is the tallest thing standing on the Cuban plain, which makes it the first thing lightning finds. After a storm the trunk is split white down one side and the air around it smells scorched, sweet, faintly of ozone and burnt sap. This is when someone comes looking. Paleros walk out to the struck palm and search the ground at its base for a stone, a hard dark wedge that the strike is said to have driven into the soil, and if they find one they carry it home wrapped in cloth. That stone is called a piedra de rayo, a thunderstone, and it is one of the things a house needs to seat the power the Congos of Cuba call Nsasi.

Siete Rayos is his Spanish name and it counts his weapons: seven lightning bolts. Nsasi is the older one, and it is not a coincidence that it sounds like weather. It comes from nzazi, the Kikongo word for lightning, carried across the Atlantic in the mouths of Bakongo captives and preserved almost intact in the ritual vocabulary of Palo Monte, which linguists have shown is essentially Kikongo rather than the vague pan-Bantu jumble it was long assumed to be. The name is the phenomenon. Before he is a personality he is a strike.

What he is, exactly, resists the word god. In Palo he is an mpungu, one of a set of forces gathered out of the world and made to live in a container, and the container matters as much as the force. His is a nganga, also called a prenda or an nkisi: an iron cauldron or a clay pot packed with sticks cut in the bush, earth, bones, the thunderstone, and the remains and consent of a dead person, the nfumbe, who does the working. The cauldron is cold to the touch and heavier than it looks. Nothing about it is decorative. When a Tata speaks to Siete Rayos he speaks into that pot, in a creolized Kikongo, over rum and tobacco smoke, and what he gets back arrives through the dead man inside it.

So there is no agreed face. Palo did not produce statues of him, and the image most often propped beside his cauldron is borrowed: the chromolithograph of Saint Barbara, a young woman crowned in gold, wrapped in a red mantle, a sword in one hand and a squat stone tower at her shoulder. She was pressed into service because her legend ends in lightning, her father struck dead for killing her, and because Catholic images were what was available to people forbidden their own. The same borrowing runs sideways into Lucumí practice, where Siete Rayos is spoken of alongside the orisha Changó, another owner of thunder in another Cuban religion, and many people are initiated in both. His colours are red and white. Beyond that, houses differ, and they differ loudly.

The Kongo original behind him was a power of the sky in a farming country, where a storm is not an image of wrath but the thing that saves the harvest. What arrived in Cuba was that idea run through the sugar plantation, and it came out harder. Nsasi in Cuba is a fighter and a maker of spells, a power invoked for court cases, for revenge, for command, for the kind of luck that leaves other men worse off. He is also the standing example of male appetite in the tradition, charming, boastful, a relentless chaser of women, and nobody who serves him pretends otherwise.

His importance is structural, not just temperamental. Along with Sarabanda, the iron power, Siete Rayos is one of the two mpungu a priest must receive before he is permitted to initiate anyone into the religion. That means the oath at the centre of Palo is sworn in front of his cauldron. Picture the room: the pot on the floor, candles low, chamba burned across the mouth of it in a hot mist of rum and pepper, a cigar lit and its smoke blown deliberately over everything, and a man on his knees promising something he cannot take back. Bananas and red wine go down at the foot of a palm afterwards. The promise is not made to the priest. It is made to the thing in the pot, and the thing in the pot is understood to be listening.

What he grants follows from that. He carries fire and lightning, so he can burn an obstacle out of the way. He decides quarrels, which makes him the power people run to when a case is going badly or a rival will not back down. He puts iron into a man’s nerve. He can heat a body, a temper or a house until something breaks open. Because the palm draws lightning down, offerings meant for him are commonly left at its roots, and the tree functions as a kind of antenna in reverse.

The limits are the same fact seen from the other side. A power that lives in a cauldron has to be fed, and a neglected prenda is not neutral, it is an offended one. The pact runs through a dead person who had a name and a temper of his own, and the relationship can sour. He is quick, which means he is careless with his own people as readily as with theirs. And the justice he deals is not sentimental about who called on him. Ask him to settle a matter and he may settle it entirely, including the parts you liked. Palo is a closed initiatory religion, and much of what it knows about handling him it deliberately does not publish, which is worth remembering before treating any list of his attributes, including this one, as complete.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Siete Rayos?

Siete Rayos, also called Nsasi, is the mpungu of thunder, lightning and fire in Palo Monte, the Kongo-derived Afro-Cuban religion also known as Regla Conga. His Spanish name means “seven lightning bolts,” while Nsasi comes from nzazi, the Kikongo word for lightning. He is one of the most important powers in the tradition and rules over justice, virility and spell-craft.

Is Siete Rayos the same as Shango?

They are not the same figure, but they are treated as counterparts. Siete Rayos belongs to Palo Monte, which has Kongo roots, while Changó or Shango is an orisha of the Yoruba-derived Lucumí religion, and both own thunder. In Cuba many people are initiated in both traditions, so the two are routinely spoken of together, and both are also identified with the Catholic Saint Barbara.

Where does Siete Rayos live?

He is seated in a nganga, also called a prenda or nkisi, which is an iron cauldron or clay pot kept in the home of a Palo priest. It holds sticks, earth, a thunderstone and the remains of a dead person, the nfumbe, through whom the work is done. He is also associated with the royal palm, and offerings for him are often left at the foot of one.

Why is Siete Rayos important in Palo initiations?

Along with Sarabanda, Siete Rayos is one of the two mpungu that a priest must receive before he can initiate anyone else. Because of this, oaths and initiations in Palo Monte are sworn in front of his cauldron. That places him at the structural centre of how the religion reproduces itself.

What offerings are given to Siete Rayos?

Common offerings include bananas, red wine, cigars and chamba, a rum infused with hot pepper. These are given at his cauldron or left at the base of a royal palm. His colours are red and white, though the finer details of his service vary considerably from one Palo house to another.