At first glance "Mysteries and Secrets of Voodoo, Santeria and Obeah" looks like a serious scholarly work but it is actually anything but. The eurocentric foreword by Reverend Canon Stanley Mogford establishes a tone of cultural superiority and sets a baseline for the book by his definition of Christian supremacy over all other religions or spiritual traditions. He states that conversion to Christianity is a universal principle and that unchristian or "primitive" societies are an aberration. One must assume that the authors support this view. It would not have been surprising to read nonsense like this forty years ago, but to be printed today? What were the publishers thinking? The authors' outsider tone is condescending and colonialist and their speculative research meanders in and out of cultural histories that could not have possibly been linked to the Santeria tradition. In a generalist, muddled way, they tie in various mystical traditions as if all are equal in superstitious triviality, so they MUST be connected ie. the Minotaur of Knossos, the Venus of Willendorf etc. By constant reference to the Santeria/Christian syncretization, they imply that Santeria did not stand alone as a fully-functioning valid spiritual tradition for centuries before encountering European domination. Because of its old-fashioned tone of imperialism, this book represents what can happen with the worst of ethnocentric-based study, and is to be avoided in favor of works on Santeria and Obeah by practitioners of those traditions in their own words (or anti-ethnocentric writers).
