The Bullroarer Atlas

MARCUZZI2010-001 - secondary catalog

Afro-Cuban orisha worship / Oro-derived cult

Cuba - Caribbean - Afro-Atlantic

Sacred / spirit

A Pipil bull-roarer — a slender cane rod with a wooden identification tag tied near the handle; no image of the Oro-derived Afro-Cuban...
Representative image. A Pipil bull-roarer — a slender cane rod with a wooden identification tag tied near the handle; no image of the Oro-derived Afro-Cuban bullroarer tradition documented here has been located, so this unrelated Central American piece stands in for the general form. Museum of Ethnography (acc. 1900.03.0495) Image source

Oro / bullroarer cult English

Source term: bullroarer

Oro: a feared Yoruba secret society whose voice is the bull-roarer; carried to Cuba within orisha worship, where it is known as Oru or Orun.

In precolonial Yorubaland the Oro society was among the most feared collectives of all, carrying out on behalf of the state councils the executions of criminals and witches; the bull-roarer was its voice. Michael Marcuzzi's 2010 study traces that cult across the Atlantic into Cuban orisha worship, where the transatlantic separation severed it from its judicial role and it survived in a more devotional but equally secretive form, known there as Oru or Orun. His central observation concerns the instrument itself: the bull-roarer emblematic of the cult is, in Cuba, often constructed in a way that actually mutes it, so that the sounding object central to Oro's identity is frequently built not to sound.

this emblematic sounding instrument of the cult is often constructed in a manner that actually "mutes" the instrument.

Marcuzzi 2010, "The Bullroarer Cult in Cuba," Latin American Music Review 31(2):151-181 (published abstract)
Function
Afro-Cuban orisha/Oro bullroarer-cult literature attestation from article metadata and the ResearchGate-indexed abstract; full article access is still needed for detailed function extraction.
Map confidence
low_medium - Cuba country centroid; public metadata does not name a Cuban locality
Source location
pp. 151-181; public ResearchGate abstract/metadata and AECID issue contents only, full text not locally acquired

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