The Art of Sweeping Sickness and Catching Death: Babalú Aye, Materiality, and Mortality in Lukumí Religious Practice

Abstract:This article explores the ritual act of sweeping away sickness from the body as associated with Babalú Aye, the deity of healing and miracles. Babalú Aye is worshipped by adherents of Yorùbá and Dahomean groups and their descendants worldwide, and this article focuses on the curative arts and articulations of this orisha/fodun in Cuba's Afro-Atlantic religious complex. Babalú Aye's materiality and rites encompass unique vernaculars of space, performativity, and materiality within Lukumí religion; I show how the deity crosses borders and boundaries unlike any other in the pantheon. Through an examination and focus on Babalú Aye's broom, and associated ritual and medicinal technologies his priests and devotees employ in his healing rites, I posit that Babalú Aye's aesthetics and ceremonies reorder and equilibrate the body, removing death and sickness. Sweeping and carefully choreographed actions that are designed to detach, catch, and remove Ikú/death and Arun/sickness are the means by which his priests restore health, acts that comprise a Lukumí response to the need for a spiritually aligned system of healthcare. By extension, the modalities of divination, initiation, offerings, sacrifice, herbalism, music, dance, and prayer are composite strategies that form part of Babalú Aye's healing repertoire––they are the foundational elements of practice that are ultimately employed to restore health and to promote and prolong life in Lukumí worship.