Calendar of Orisha festivals: the year in Brazil and in Cuba

Anyone searching for "the calendar of Orisha festivals" usually expects a single table, one date per deity. The sources we have show something else: at least two lists of dates, one Brazilian and one Cuban, which use the same Catholic calendar and arrive at different answers. And beneath them a third calendar, that of each house, which no table settles. This guide sets the two lists side by side, with page references, and explains why the date that counts is the one kept by the terreiro.

Why the festivals fall on saints' days

Roger Bastide, in O Candomblé da Bahia (1961), begins with the clash between two calendars. The African one ran into the Catholic one, imposed by the master on the enslaved; to dance in peace, the enslaved celebrated before a Catholic altar that served as a disguise, and each Yoruba deity ended up tied to a saint, with its festival moved to that saint's day (Bastide, pp. 103–104). This is where what he calls the "ordinary but Africanized calendar" comes from. We have covered syncretism itself in another piece, Afro-Brazilian syncretism; what matters here is the practical consequence: the dates.

Bastide's Brazilian list

The list Bastide reproduces has thirteen dates (Bastide, p. 104):

Date	Saint's day	Festival
January 20	Saint Sebastian	Obaluaiê (Omolu)
February 2	Purification	Oxum and Iemanjá
April 23	Saint George	Oxóssi
June 13	Saint Anthony	Ogum
June 24	Saint John the Baptist	Xangô Afonjá
June 29	Saints Peter and Paul	Orixá-la (Oxalá)
July 26	Saint Anne	Nanã
August 24	Saint Bartholomew	Oxumarê
September 27	Saints Cosmas and Damian	the Twins (Ibeji)
September 30	Saint Jerome	Xangô
November 2	All Souls' Day	the Eguns
December 4	Saint Barbara	Iansã
December 8	Immaculate Conception	Oxum or Iemanjá

Right after the table comes the caveat that is almost always lost when it is copied: according to Bastide, this list applies more to the Yoruba of Pernambuco than to those of Bahia, where it turns up mainly in Candomblé houses of the Bantu nation (Bastide, pp. 104–105). In a note he records other calendars from houses in Recife, all different from one another, and a telling episode: when the Mental Hygiene Service tried to limit the festivals to eighteen fixed days, the babalorixás protested, and the final agreement kept the cap of eighteen but left each house free to spread them over the year (p. 105).

In Bahia, each terreiro keeps its own time

For the Ketu, Ijexá and Nagô Candomblé houses of Bahia, Bastide is blunt: since the houses are autonomous, there are as many sacred times as there are terreiros, and each opens once a year to celebrate all the Orishas (p. 105). He adds that the great festivals of Nigeria are concentrated in May and June, at the start of the rains, and that in most Candomblé houses they moved to September through December, the start of summer on the other side of the equator (p. 106).

The examples he gives show the range. The Gantois held its season at the end of September, opening with the washing and closing with the baiani ceremony, as close as possible to September 30, Saint Jerome's day (pp. 106–107). In one Ogum house, the festivals ran from the second week of September to the first of December, on Sundays only; in the house of Oxumarê, they were held in January and early February (pp. 107–108). And a house in mourning holds no festival: it stays closed for a year (p. 108).

The year opens with the Waters of Oxalá

The Candomblé year, says Bastide, does not run from January to December. It begins at the end of August or on the first Friday of September, depending on the terreiro, and the ceremony that opens it had two old names: "new yam" and "water of Oxalá" (Bastide, p. 109). Pierre Verger describes the cycle in Orixás: in certain terreiros, above all those of Ketu origin, the journey of Oxalufã to the kingdom of Shango and his unjust imprisonment are remembered with three weeks of festivals. On a Friday the sacred objects of Oxalá leave the peji; on the following Friday come the Waters of Oxalá, fetched in silence by people dressed in white; the cycle closes on a Sunday, with the Pestle of Oxaguiã (Verger, Orixás, pp. 105–106).

Verger links this rite to the washing of the floor of the Basilica of Senhor do Bonfim, on the Thursday before Bonfim Sunday, and calls it a syncretized version of the Waters of Oxalá (p. 106).

The year also has a pause. From Carnival to the end of Holy Week, says Bastide, runs a period in which the Orishas are believed to have gone back to Africa; the Candomblé houses close their doors during Holy Week, and before that comes the lorogun, the temporary expulsion of the Orishas, seen as their departure for war (Bastide, pp. 113–115).

Two festivals with a date in Brazil

Two Brazilian dates appear in Verger with a description of their own. On February 2, the offering to Iemanjá on Rio Vermelho beach, in Salvador, draws a crowd; and in Rio de Janeiro, Santos and Porto Alegre, the night of December 31 brings hundreds of thousands of Umbanda followers to the beaches (Verger, Orixás, p. 71). The annual festival of Obaluaiê, the Olubajé, has no date in Verger: he records the name, the dishes and Monday as the Orisha's day of the week (p. 80).

Brown's Cuban list

For Cuba, the fullest list among our sources is in David H. Brown, Santería Enthroned (2003), in an appendix of 20 rows, each with Orisha, saint and date (Brown, p. 305). Twelve of those rows, in his spelling:

Orisha (Brown)	Saint	Date
Oyá	Candelaria / Santa Teresa	February 2
Eleguá	San Antonio / El Niño de Atocha	June 13
Ochosi	San Norberto	June 16
Naná Burukú	Nuestra Señora del Carmen	June 16
Ogún	San Pedro	June 29
Yemayá	Virgen de Regla	September 7
Ochún	Caridad del Cobre	September 8–12
Obatalá	Virgen de las Mercedes	September 24
Los Ibeyi	Santos Cosme y Damián	September 26
Orula	San Francisco de Asís	October 4
Changó	Santa Bárbara	December 4
Babalú Ayé	San Lázaro	December 17

Two of these festivals are described on other pages. In 1900 the Cabildo Africano Lucumí celebrated its patron, Saint Barbara, on December 4, with a Mass, a procession and drumming for Changó (Brown, p. 66); and Lydia Cabrera, in El Monte, writes that throughout Cuba Changó is officially celebrated on that day (Cabrera, p. 255). The Virgin of Regla is the case where the sources disagree on the day: Brown gives September 7 (pp. 66 and 305); Verger, who describes the procession with batá drums through the streets of Regla, gives September 8, the Nativity of Our Lady (Verger, Orixás, p. 72). We record both.

What changes from one side to the other

With both tables open, the differences stand out:

• December 4, Saint Barbara: Iansã in Bastide's list, Changó in Brown's.
• June 13, Saint Anthony: Ogum in Brazil, Eleguá in Cuba.
• June 29, Saint Peter: Oxalá (Orixá-la) in the Brazilian list, Ogún in the Cuban one.
• February 2: Oxum and Iemanjá in Brazil, Oyá in Cuba.
• Oshosi: April 23, Saint George's day, in Bastide's list; San Norberto, June 16, in Brown's. Verger confirms the Cuban saint and adds that in Bahia Oxóssi is Saint George and in Rio de Janeiro, Saint Sebastian (Verger, Orixás, p. 51).
• The twins: September 27 in Brazil, 26 in Cuba.

Neither list is "wrong". Each records how one tradition read the same Catholic calendar, and neither replaces the date kept by the house.

How to use these lists

Use them as a map, not as a diary. If you want to attend an Orisha's festival, the date that counts is the one kept by the terreiro or house you attend, and the person who sets it is the priest in charge. The lists help you understand why a festival falls where it does and why the same saint can call different Orishas on the two sides of the sea. For each Orisha, the page at /orixas gathers what the sources say about it. Pages of Bastide, Brown and Cabrera: printed numbering; of Verger, Orixás: those of the digital file we consulted.

---

What you have read here is rooted in the 256 Odus of Ifá — the corpus we study verse by verse. Read them as contemplation: real divination belongs at the table of a consecrated babalawo.

Explore the Odus of Ifá →