Palo Mayombe is a living initiatic religion passed orally from teacher to initiate. Thus it can only be fully understood within the context of a spiritual lineage (rama) and house (munanso) as each will have their own set of secret teachings, taboos and techniques through which they interact with the spirit and natural world. This initiatory structure is paramount to understanding the religion. It empowers the initiate with a spiritual line of ancestral practitioners thereby granting him or her a degree of authority to work the spirits and the dead; an authority that is otherwise unattainable by any single individual on their own. Thus you cannot simply learn Palo from books, videos or through solitary practice. I encourage everyone to re-read those last two sentences; not because they are well written, but rather because of the fundamental importance of the message … no lineage, no spiritual authority to work Palo, simple as that!
The underlying cosmology in Palo is one of animism. In short, everything has spirit (nkisi) and it is the Palero’s role to form pacts and work with the spiritual landscape in order to produce sacred medicines for the community and to personally grow, transform and evolve spiritually. There is a creator god who we call Nzambi who is the a catalyzing agent of creation rather than a judging and wrathful demiurgic god and is far removed from our day-to-day human concerns. We do catch glimpses of Nzambi expressed throughout the universe; perhaps the most prominent are his celestial manifestations as the masculine power of the Sun (Ntango) and her feminine manifestation as the Moon (Ngonde).
While there is no official pantheon of deities in Palo, there are various catalogs of spirits and named forces of nature (mpungu). This is a major point of misinformation on the web and in books. Even some otherwise reputable sources will discus a pseudo pantheon of Palo mpungos as core to the tradition, but this is not entirely accurate, at least not when discussing pure Palo Mayombe. Mpungos are the essential forces of creation and life on earth, many are indeed universal, while others can pertain to specific landscapes or natural phenomena of a region and even specific lineages.
The ritual life and heartbeat of the religion is centered on the Munanzo and in particular around a foundational Nganga (prenda or fundamento) to which initiates (ngueyos) are sworn to serve. At very high level the Nganga is the physical vessel in which Nkisi, Mpungu and Nfumbe ( spirit of the dead) reside, interact with the physical world and receive offerings and sacrifice. Should an ngueyo be deemed ready to become a Tata Nganga or Yaya Nganga they will receive an Nganga birthed from the fundamento of their godfather aligned to the specific ancestral , natural and cosmic forces that correspond to their own spirit. As a Tata (‘Father’) or Yaya (‘Mother’) of the religion progresses on their spiritual paths, they may receive other ngangas linked to the forces of different Mpungu for specific purposes.
The belief in the totality of Nzambi together with the importance of the ancestors (bakulu) and making pacts and working with the spirits of nature (mpungu) the landscape (basimbi) and the dead (nfumbe) are the foundational tenets of the religion. It is a core ideology that originates with the traditional Bantu religions of the Bakongo people of central Africa and thus Palo is identified as Regla-Kongo (Congo Law/Rules). But despite this Congolese foundation, Palo as we know it does not exist in this exact form in Africa.
Palo as we know today emerged in Cuba when escaped Bakongo slaves, their ancestors and sprits and their decedents came into contact with the the Cuban wilderness. A simple testament to this fact is that the entirety of the plants, herbs and animals we employ for medicine and ritual are of Caribbean origin. It it thus improper to say that Palo is an ATR in the strict sense since it is not a direct import – or a true continuation – of an African religion. It is however a diasporatic offspring of Bantu belief systems and perhaps best described as a cousin-tradition to the Nkisi cults of the Congo.