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Santigron's most prominent residents (at least from their generation, keen to maintain standing and traditions) pour out rum to the protective spirits of the village.

Santigron's pantheon of spirits is elaborate indeed with ancestral spirits, animistic spirits and celestial spirits. (In Dutch I like to call their respective realms: het dodenrijk, het nodenrijk en het godenrijk.

Each human being individually enjoys or suffers the lifelong accompaniment by two of each sort, though these spirits may not consistently distinguish between you and certain relatives of yours. The ancestral spirits are specific ancestors indeed, so a complex web of specific stories layered with past generations is laid upon your life. Many of this is shrouded in secrecy and knowlegde is fragmented among clans and individuals. To add to your (spiritual) unsecurity, a special dangerous kind of spirits dress up and pretend to be certain spirits providing you with false clues, just to make fun of you.

Of course, we in our secure digital lifes and otherwise in our standardized/globalized/peeled-off knowledge can not imagine such circumstances, but it seems cheerfulness and fun are the best remedies.

These beliefs have been shaped by (mythical) African traditions, a new hostile human and natural environment, of course the experience of slavery, the tracking down of extended family relations to the first couple to arive from Africa and even an understream of Jewish habits originating from those Jewish plantationholders that fled from Brasil in the 17th century.

Nowadays the pragmatic coexistence of catholic, protestant and even moslim beliefs is to be taken into account as well, and of course the experience of a life straddling proud traditional tribal life and the (jealously regarded) individual race towards elusive modernity. The continuing social-economic depressions in Paramaribo however save Santigron's lifestyle for the time being.