Many years ago, when I lived in San Diego, I was a member of the Rosicrucian Brotherhood, AMORC, and a founding member of the lodge there. Most people familiar with AMORC from their at one time omnipresent ads in magazines such as Popular Mechanics and FATE know them for their mail order lessons. What many people don't know is that they also have actual group meetings and sites. AMORC's Egyptian Museum in San Jose, California One of the things I remember about the public meetings was a statement at many of the rituals about the two great questions of existence: Life, and what comes before, and Death, and what comes after. People seek to know that our very essence, our soul or spirit,

Santeria is a Caribbean tradition that originated with certain African slaves revering their deities in the Christian framework that was imposed on them once they were forced from their homelands. Thus the deities of the Western African Yoruba pantheon, or orishas, became “saints” by association and Santeria is the worship of those saints. It is practiced today in the United States (and elsewhere, obviously), mostly by Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Venezuelans, Colombians, Dominicans, and other people of Latin American extraction, both black and white. As is the case with syncretistic religions, it is no longer the same faith as that practiced by the Yoruba people in Africa, but a unique