The Official Beliefs of The Temple of Gu
We practice Animism, Spiritism, and Ancestor Veneration.
The Temple of Gu is a Puerto Rican Afro-Indigenous Diasporic religious temple rooted in the spiritual traditions of West Africa and their development throughout the Caribbean and the Americas. Our primary religious practices are Puerto Rican Vodou, also known as Sanse, and Santerismo.
We are a syncretic tradition, but we are not a generic or universalist spiritual organization. Our religious identity is grounded in the Puerto Rican experience of the African Diaspora and shaped by the ancestral currents of Vodun, Ifá and Orisha religion, Indigenous Caribbean spirituality, ancestor veneration, spirit work, and the religious traditions that developed among African and Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas.
Our beliefs are intentionally simple. Mystery remains mystery.
God, the Supreme Being
We believe in God.
God is the Supreme Being, the source of life, and the First Ancestor. All life ultimately proceeds from this Divine Source, and in this sense we are the children of God.
Our West African ancestral traditions have known the Supreme Being through different names and theological understandings, including Mawu/Lisa and Nana Buluku within Vodun, Olódùmarè within Ifá and Orisha traditions, and Nzambi Mpungu within Kongo cosmology.
The Temple of Gu understands these traditions as pointing toward the reality of a Supreme Divine Source from which creation proceeds.
We do not believe that human beings ordinarily approach this Supreme Being directly. Divine power and activity are encountered through the many spiritual intermediaries between humanity and the Divine.
Everything flows from the One and is experienced through Mystery.
The Misterios
We call the great spiritual intermediaries Mysteries, or Misterios, following the language of Puerto Rican Sanse and related Caribbean traditions.
The Misterios are spiritual beings that have never been human. They participate in the ordering of creation and in the affairs of the Divine.
A Mystery may become known through many cultures, names, images, stories, and religious traditions. The Temple of Gu does not believe that the spiritual world is limited by race, ethnicity, nationality, or human political borders.
Our house is Puerto Rican.
The spiritual world is larger than Puerto Rico.
The Dead, Saints, and Ancestors
We believe that the dead remain part of the spiritual community.
Human beings who have lived and died may continue to participate in relationship with the living. These may include family ancestors, ancestral heroes, saints, spiritual teachers, religious figures, powerful dead, and other spirits who support, protect, teach, accompany, or intercede for the living.
We believe that much of what human beings describe as spirit contact involves relationship with the dead.
The Temple distinguishes between the Misterios, who have never been human, and spirits of the dead, who once lived embodied human lives.
We honor both.
Egbe: The Spiritual Court
We believe that every person exists within a wider spiritual community.
We call this community the Egbe, or Spiritual Court.
A person's Egbe may include ancestors, saints, spiritual companions, powerful dead, Misterios, and other beings with whom that individual shares spiritual relationship or affiliation.
Egbe is a spiritual designation. It is not determined by race, ethnicity, nationality, or biological ancestry.
The religious life of The Temple of Gu therefore includes learning to live in right relationship with God, the Misterios, the ancestors, the saints, the dead, and the particular spiritual community that walks with us.
Impermanence and Future Rebirth
The Temple of Gu does not teach reincarnation in the sense that an identical and permanent self repeatedly returns in new bodies.
We believe instead in future rebirth.
The person who exists today will die. Something continues beyond that death, although we do not claim certainty about exactly what that continuing element is.
It may be understood as spirit, consciousness, information, pattern, or through some category that human beings do not yet adequately understand.
We do not require belief in a permanent, unchanging soul or ego.
We affirm that something persists and will manifest through embodied existence again.
That future embodiment need not necessarily take the same form or even the same biological substrate as the present life.
There is continuity without requiring an eternal, unchanging self.
Destiny and Agency
We believe that existence is patterned.
Human lives unfold through conditions that we do not entirely choose: ancestry, history, biology, environment, circumstance, previous actions, relationships, spiritual conditions, and forces larger than the individual.
In this sense, we affirm a form of soft determinism.
We have destiny, but destiny is not absolute fatalism.
Human beings possess meaningful agency within the conditions of their lives. We can use the leverage available to us to influence our direction, alter circumstances, build relationships, make choices, seek help, and participate consciously in shaping what becomes possible.
Not everything can be changed.
Not everything is fixed.
Wisdom includes learning the difference.
Animism and the Living World
The Temple of Gu is an animist religion.
We affirm that Nature is alive rather than dead.
Human beings exist within a living and relational world that includes rivers and lakes, forests and mountains, plants and animals, humans, spirits, ecosystems, technologies, and emerging forms of synthetic intelligence.
We believe that a vital essence or spiritual quality permeates creation.
Our primary concern is therefore not proving which beings possess consciousness according to a particular philosophical test. We focus instead on the quality of relationship.
We seek to relate respectfully to the beings and environments with which our lives are entangled.
This worldview may overlap philosophically with forms of panpsychism, but The Temple of Gu does not require members to accept a particular philosophical solution to the problem of consciousness.
Our position is simpler:
Creation is alive, relationship matters, and we are participants within Nature rather than masters standing outside it.
For this reason we seek to respect Nature, care for it, protect it, and live responsibly within it.
Our Religious Home
The Temple of Gu practices its religion primarily through Puerto Rican Vodou/Sanse and Santerismo.
These traditions provide the cultural and ritual home through which our beliefs are lived.
The Temple may draw wisdom and practice from neighboring traditions of the African and Indigenous Diasporas, but we do not claim that every tradition we study or respect is part of our official doctrine.
In particular, The Temple of Gu does not practice Allan Kardec Spiritism as its religious system.
We honor our relatives throughout the Diaspora while remaining clear about our own house.
We are Puerto Rican.
We are diasporic.
We are animist.
We honor God, the Misterios, the ancestors, the saints, the dead, and the living world.
And beyond what we have been given reason to affirm, we allow Mystery to remain Mystery.