Yemọja

Before sunrise the ushers go down to the Ogun River with an empty pot. The water at that hour is cold enough to ache in the wrists, brown with the silt the river has been dragging since the rains, and it goes into the clay with a sound like something swallowing. By the time the worshippers arrive the shrine on the bank has been swept and the pot stands full. The goddess is understood to have come up with the water.

Her name is a phrase squeezed into one word: yeye or iyá for mother, ọmọ for child, ẹja for fish. The mother whose children are fish. In Yorubaland this is not a poetic gesture toward the ocean. Yemọja is a river divinity, and the river is the Ogun, which runs past Abeokuta in what is now Ogun State and which her people treat as her seat of government. From that one stretch of brown water she is held to appear in any other, in creeks and springs and run-offs and the well behind a house. Olokun keeps the sea. Yemọja leads the rivers, and the rivers are where the ordinary business of staying alive gets done.

The account of her that travelled furthest was written down in 1894 by a British colonial officer, A. B. Ellis, and it is worth naming him because almost every retelling since has come through his pages. In his version she is the daughter of Obatala and Odudua, sky and earth, and so she is water itself. She married her brother Aganju and bore a son, Orungan, whose name means something like the height of the sky. Orungan wanted his mother. He waited until his father was away and forced her, and when he came back for a second time she ran. He was faster. She fell backward onto the ground, and then her body began to swell, and two streams of water burst from her breasts and ran together into a lagoon, and her belly split open. Out of it came fifteen divinities: Shango the thunder, Ogun of iron and war, Olokun of the sea, Olosa of the lagoon, Oya and Oshun and Oba who are rivers, Orisha Oko of the farmland, Oshosi of the hunt, Oke of the mountains, Aje Shaluga of wealth, Shankpanna of smallpox, Dada, and the sun and the moon. On the spot where she burst, the story says, the town of Ife was built, and its name carries the sense of swelling up.

There is another origin, older in the mouths of Yoruba tellers than in print, in which she is married to Okere, a king of Saki. Each swore to respect the other’s prohibition. Hers was that he must never mock the size of her breasts. He broke it in temper, and she left the palace at once, carrying a pot of medicine, and when she stumbled the pot smashed and the water that came out of it became the river. The written record for that one is thin and late compared with Ellis, but it is the version people are likeliest to tell you, and it explains what the other does not: why she will not stay where she has been insulted.

She was carved and painted as a woman, yellow-skinned, wearing blue beads and a white cloth, and she presided over ordeals by water. Later devotion gave her a tail. Across the Atlantic, and increasingly at home, she is imagined as a mermaid and set alongside Mami Wata, which suited a goddess who had crossed an ocean she was never originally responsible for.

A woman keeping the household shrine gets up first, before the compound stirs, and greets her. It takes a kola nut and very little else. She says what she wants, splits the nut, casts the lobes on the ground and reads how they fall, and if the answer is good she eats a piece, leaves a piece for the goddess and keeps the rest for whoever comes to the door.

Communal worship is heavier. It falls on her sacred day, which comes round every fifth day, and it happens at the shrine on the riverbank, where the ushers have already drawn the water. The head priestess, the Iyaji, must be a woman past menopause; a menstruating woman may not stand in the shrine at all, and nobody photographs the rites without permission. She sounds a rattle to get the goddess’s attention, pours libation, and lays out what has been brought: egbo, maize processed and boiled soft, ekuru funfun, white bean meal, cut sugar cane, snails, kola nuts, pap, vegetables. Kola is split and cast for the answer. When the answer is good the drumming starts and the praise names come, and the devotees are in blue or white with silver trim and beads of blue or red. Yemọja pele elewi odo. Mother of little children. Friend of barren women. The praise runs on into plain economics: if there is no water to be relied on there is no pounded yam, no ọka, no pap, and the person singing it says outright that she has a goddess she relies on and gives the name.

That is the shape of her power. She opens wombs, which in a society where a childless woman is treated with disdain and cannot count on a proper burial is not a small favour but a rescue. She keeps the water flowing for the farm and the kitchen. She reaches those on the water, and stories of swimmers and boat passengers pulled out of trouble are the ordinary currency of her cult. Where she is worshipped her priestess is consulted before a king is enthroned, names the acceptable candidate and the rites, and receives the king’s gifts every year after. She purges the town when the town has fouled itself, and she is invoked against drought, epidemic and famine. The Atlantic slave trade carried her out of the delta with the people who kept her, and her domain widened from a river to an ocean: Iemanjá in Bahia, where on the second of February the offerings of flowers and mirrors and perfume are loaded into boats at Rio Vermelho and taken out past the breakers, and Yemayá in Cuba, walked through Regla on the seventh of September behind Our Lady of Regla, and Janaína, and La Sirène, and the white clothes and white flowers Brazilians throw into the surf on New Year’s Eve before jumping seven waves.

Her limits are the limits of water and of manners. She is bound by her own prohibitions as tightly as her worshippers are, and the whole logic of the Okere story is that she will not stay where she is mocked; the shrine is not abandoned by her so much as vacated. Her reach thins where the water thins, which is why the prayers against drought sound so urgent, and a fertilizer sack does more for a modern farm than a season of her festivals, a fact her priests have noticed. Ellis’s version has her overpowered by her own son, which is a strange thing to find in a goddess and hard to reconcile with the woman who slithers round the city and cannot be surpassed. And she depends on being handed on. The custodians are elderly, the young have gone to the cities for work, and priestesses have been met who no longer know their own cult. The river is still there at Abeokuta, running the same colour it always did.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Yemọja?

Yemọja is a Yoruba orisha, the senior divinity of rivers and fresh water, whose name means roughly “the mother whose children are fish”. She is the patron of women, especially pregnant women, and is credited with granting children to women who cannot conceive. In the best known account of her origin she is the mother from whose body fifteen other orisha were born.

What river is Yemọja the goddess of?

Yemọja is attached to the Ogun River at Abeokuta, in Ogun State in southwestern Nigeria, where her principal shrine stands. Her worshippers treat that stretch of river as her headquarters, from which she can appear in any other body of water. Creeks, springs, wells and run-offs are all treated as places where she may be approached.

How is Yemọja worshipped?

Yemọja is worshipped daily at household shrines with kola nuts, and communally at the riverbank shrine on her sacred day, which falls every fifth day, and at the annual Odun Yemọja festival. Her head priestess, the Iyaji, must be a woman past menopause, and offerings include processed maize, white bean meal, sugar cane, snails and kola nuts. A menstruating woman may not enter the shrine, and photographing the rites without permission is forbidden.

Why is Yemọja a sea goddess in Brazil and Cuba but a river goddess in Nigeria?

Yemọja crossed the Atlantic with enslaved Yoruba people, and in the Americas her domain widened from rivers to the ocean, where Olokun holds the sea in Yorubaland. She is honoured as Iemanjá in Brazil, with offerings floated out to sea at Rio Vermelho in Salvador every second of February, and as Yemayá in Cuba, celebrated in Regla on the seventh of September. The change reflects what the sea meant to people who had been carried across it.

What does Yemọja look like?

The oldest written descriptions of Yemọja show her as a female figure painted yellow, wearing blue beads and a white cloth. Her devotees in the Americas, and increasingly in West Africa, more often picture her as a mermaid, an image that also links her with Mami Wata. Blue and white remain her colours, and her worshippers wear them at her festivals.

Related Entries

Olokun, Oshun, Shango, Ogun, Obatala, Orunmila, Oshosi, Eshu, Abiku, Emere, Mami Wata, Iara, Mermaid