Yemaya
Yemaya is one of the Orisha (great goddesses) of Yoruba spirituality and mythology, She is now goddes to many diaspora. In her original homeland, Nigria she was said to be the daughter of the sea.
She is adorned in seven skirts of blue and white and like the seas and profound lakes she is deep and unknowable. In her path of Okutti she is the queen of witches carrying within her deep and dark secrets. Her number is seven for the seven seas, her colors are blue and white, and she is most often represented by the fish who are her children. Her name, a shortened version of Yeyé Omo Eja means “Mother Whose Children are the Fish” to reflect the fact that her children are uncountable.
Yemayá lives and rules over the seas and lakes. She also rules over maternity in our lives as she is the Mother of All. She is considered the source of all water, the source of all life and was prayed to for fertility and for aid with childbirth. All life started in the sea, the amneotic fluid inside the mother’s womb is a form of sea where the embryo must transform and evolve through the form of a fish before becoming a human baby. In this way Yemayá displays herself as truly the mother of all.
Yemaya traveled with many of her people on the slave ships, comforting them during their forced migration to the New World. Through this passage her role expanded to Mother Ocean, she evolved and adapted to support the needs and changes of her children.
She Who Gives Birth to All of Life, Yemaya is aligned with the power of creation flowing through all that is. In this aspect, she assists with remembering, reclaiming and activating our own innate creative power, realizing our true and natural ability to create and experience magnificence within our life.
This Mother Goddess brings the blessings of new energy, new creativity, new opportunities and new experiences. Yemaya also lovingly assists and supports the rebirthing process, cleansing and purifying the old energy, releasing that which has served its purpose, allowing for renewal and new beginnings.
Goddess Yemaya reminds us that to exist is to be in a constant state of change, everything is constantly adapting, changing and evolving. If requested, she will help remove resistance to change, helping us to adapt when necessary, helping us to embrace our natural evolution so that we may realize and experience the true essence of our ever ascending consciousness.
The most predominant expression of Yemaya is that of a gentle and nurturing Divine Mother. Although strongly protective, in the aspect of Mother Goddess, Yemaya is the essence of infinite, all encompassing love, love that endures the eternal depths of time, spans the breadth of Universal Space and traverses with us through each and every incarnation and through all that transpires in between. Goddess Yemaya is a beloved Divine Mother who will help any and all who call upon her to move beyond perceived limitations and realize the full magnitude and magnificence of their True Potential.
Legacy
In the African diaspora, Ymoja has remained a popular divinity. She is Imanje or Yemanja in Brazilian Macumba, where she is ocean-goddess of the crescent moon. In Cuba she is Yemaya, appearing in many variants: Yemaya Ataramagwa, the wealthy queen of the sea; stern Yemaya Achabba; violent Yemaya Oqqutte; and the overpowering Yemaya Olokun, who can be seen only in dreams. She is Agwe in Haiti, La Balianne in New Orleans. She is syncretized with Our Lady of Regla and Mary, Star of the Sea; in Brazil, she is Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, whose followers wear crystal beads and greet her appearance with shouts of “Odoya.”
(via thisisnotafrica)
From far across the ocean, Kunapipi came, the First Mother, bringing with her the ancestors. She first established the songlines, the lines from dreamtime, and taught the people to see the lines, to know them, in their songs, to follow them again and again to the sacred places on her body.
Once in a lifetime, each of the people goes to one of these sacred places, a cave hollowed out from the Mother’s body, and swings the bullroar instrument until Kunapipi sings loudly and introduces the initiate to his twin soul, the one who resides always at Kunapipi’s side.
And upon one’s death, one’s soul rejoins its twin at Kunapipi’s side, until she sees fit to send it back to follow the songlines again across her holy body to her sacred places.
The Children of Lir
There once was a man called Lir, who was happily married with three children. The eldest a girl and the two youngest boys. He loved his family with all his heart until one day, his wife passed away. Horrified at the thought of his children living without a mother, Lir married a beautiful woman named Aoife.
Aoife was terribly jealous of her new husband’s love for his children as he adored them far more than he did her. Consumed by jealousy, she ordered one of the servants to kill the children. When he refused, she used her magic instead to turn them into swans.
The children were doomed to wander until the spell could be broken if they were blessed by a monk. To stay together, their father fashioned a gold chain to fit around all three of their necks so they would not be tossed apart on the raging waters. They spent 300 years on Lough Derravaragh, 300 years in the Sea of Moyle and 300 years in Irrus Domnann Erris.
Eventually, the swans were found by monks belonging to a monastery on an island. They blessed the swans and they changed back into humans, but being 900 years old, they were withered and ancient. They three were buried together, the gold chain still linking their necks.
(Source: bythegods, via hermione-granger)
“The Alkonost reproduces by laying eggs on the sea-shore then putting them into the water. The sea is then calm for six or seven days at which point the eggs hatch, bringing a storm. She lives in paradise but goes into our world to deliver a message. Her voice is so sweet that anybody hearing it can forget everything.” (From Wikipedia)
“We have the right, and the obligation, to tell old stories in our own ways, because they are our stories.” — Neil Gaiman (via eightyninedreams)
(Source: herinfinitedreams, via fuckyeahgaiman)
“Oh Grandmother, what big ears you have got,” she said.
Arthur Rackham, from Hansel & Grethel & other tales, by Brothers Grimm, New York, 1920.
(via cheveuxroux)
“Like the sirens, the Nixie by her song draws listening youth to herself, and then into the deep.”
…so she said, “Farewell,” and rose as lightly as a bubble to the surface of the water. The sun had just set as she raised her head above the waves; but the clouds were tinted with crimson and gold, and through the glimmering twilight beamed the evening star in all its beauty.
(From Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid.)
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Should the people always live, or should they die? They had some difficulty in agreeing on this; but finally Old Man said, ‘I will tell you what I will do. I will throw a buffalo chip into the water, and, if it floats, the people die for four days and live again. But, if it sinks, they will die forever.’
So he threw it in, and it floated.
‘No,’ said Old Woman, ‘we will not decide in that way. I will throw in this rock. If it floats, the people will die for four days. If it sinks, the people will die forever.’
Then Old Woman threw the rock out into the water, and it sank to the bottom.
‘There,’ said she, ‘it is better for the people to die forever; for, if they did not die forever, they would never feel sorry for each other, and there would be no sympathy in the world.’
” — From a Blackfoot story on the Order of Life and Death.“Under each arm he carries an umbrella; one of them, with pictures on the inside, he spreads over the good children, and then they dream the most beautiful stories the whole night. But the other umbrella has no pictures, and this he holds over the naughty children so that they sleep heavily, and wake in the morning without having dreamed at all.” — From Ole Lukøje, a tale by Hans Christian Andersen.