Tony Van Der Meer was raised a Baptist, but years ago, friends introduced him to the religion of the Yoruba people of Nigeria. The Yoruba revere family and ancestors. Van Der Meer, 48, an African studies professor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, says he saw a powerful demonstration of his new faith a decade ago involving his father, a man he barely knew.
Van Der Meer was 5 when he'd last seen his father, who was deported to his native Suriname as an undocumented alien. (''He said he was Puerto Rican'' to get into the United States, Van Der Meer says, chuckling.) ''I assumed that my father had [died], because we'd had a hard time trying to find him.''
A consultation with a Santeria priest revealed that somone was worrying about Van Der Meer. (Santeria is a Cuban version of the Yoruban religion). The priest didn't know the person's identity but described his appearance.
Later, Van Der Meer learned that his father was alive but dying in a Suriname hospital. He traveled to be by his side and ''watched him take his last breath.'' It was then that he learned his father fit the description given by the priest.
According to the biblical Book of Job, ''With the ancient is wisdom, and in length of days understanding.'' The estimated 17 million adherents of Yoruba believe that wisdom rests with the spirits of their ancestors.
Last weekend, the Cambridge Center for Adult Education devoted its second annual conference on African ritual and art to the role of ancestors.
The conference ''focused on seeing how the traditions from Africa, transplanted in the Western Hemisphere ... still have influence,'' says Cambridge Center spokesman Jim Smith.
Chanting, drumming, and other rituals demonstrated how descendents of an ancient culture venerate their forebears.
Dragged from Africa during slavery, the Yoruba brought religious beliefs that couldn't be suffocated under the weight of chains.
Today, those beliefs are a living link to the past, a way to remember their heritage. Van Der Meer, himself a priest of Ifa, the Yoruban spirit in charge of divinations, says hundreds of people in the Boston area seek divinations from Wande Abimbola, a Boston University religion professor designated by Nigerian diviners as their spokesman. Van Der Meer apprenticed with Abimbola.
The Yoruba believe in a supreme god and more than 400 lesser divinities, called orishas, each with its own priests and sects. Yoruban religion holds that the universe is divided between benevolent and malevolent divinities. Ancestors are part of the benevolent half of the universe.
Believers often keep shrines to their deceased ancestors in their homes. Joe Platz's is a simple table with photos of grandparents and personal belongings of his parents; he prays to these family members daily. Platz, a drum maker who lives near Springfield, learned to drum from a Yoruban priest and gravitated to the religion after being raised a Catholic.
Like ancestors, orishas are sources of wisdom, communicated with through priests trained in Yoruba sacred texts handed down through oral tradition. Believers consult the orishas when confronting problems or seeking advice. Ifa priests use a divining chain, typically made of metal leaves with concave and convex sides. When thrown, the leaves can fall in various combinations, each of which corresponds to a chapter in the oral tradition. During a divination, the priest throws the chain, observes the combination, and offers verses from the appropriate chapter, seeking one that best applies to the believer's particular issue.
The story will indicate how to appease the orishas through sacrifice, which in the Yoruba tradition is how humans rearrange the forces of the universe in their favor. In Africa, a live chicken is a typical sacrifice, and American practitioners occasionally use one, says Platz. But sacrificing might instead involve offering a tiny sum of money or some cooked food.
''African sacrifice has been very much misunderstood,'' Abimbola wrote in his book ''Ifa Will Mend Our Broken World.''
''Africans believe that verbalization is not enough in one's relationship with the supernatural. How can we be sure that Olodumare [God] speaks our language, or all the languages of the world?''
If religious beliefs are for the Yoruba the synapses of cultural memory, they also are a reminder of the similarities among different faiths. ''Most religions lead back to the same sorts of ideas,'' says Platz. In his book, Abimbola, using language Christians would recognize, says that ''there is a crying need for a new covenant based on the energy of Ifa which is a peaceful, intellectual and tranquil energy. ... We must seek a new way of life if we all want to survive in the world.''