Oshun

Maybe you want something related to beauty, to art.

You might connect yourself with Oshun, for instance, is a specific kind of Orisha.

If you think about other traditions like Hinduism, you have other archetypes.

For instance, Kali, the Hindu goddess of war, of transformation, the most powerful image of women we have in Hinduism.

And then you have figures like La Sirene in Haiti.

But just to clarify, this does not mean that River Muwa is another name for Oshun or Yemaya or Mami Wata or La Sareen.

These traditions, in fact, actually have their own histories and religious meanings, and I personally feel it is such a disservice to the cultures and the people who celebrate these energies and traditions to collapse them all into just one generic label.

Across the Atlantic world, we repeatedly encounter traditions in which water isn't understood simply as an inanimate part of the landscape.

I think in the next year or so we're going to have a, a cycle of leadership.

Oshun doesn't like that.

The goddess Oshun, it's all about love and respect for women.

Anything that the motto of Oshun is that which is not appreciated will be taken away.

That which is not appreciated will be taken away.

You don't appreciate your wife, she's gone.

So much later in the beginning of the 80s, she was looking at prehistoric sites.

and she was really interested in rocks in rock formations and also in making sculptures that acquired a very fluid kind of gender and she refers to Yoruba she refers to many deities Ochun for example at the center of many many rituals namely in Cuba she mixes those references with Santeria lots of practices that she would have known through the maids and the people working in her house for her parents, basically.

When she left at 12, she had a well-off family.

It was Catholic, so she went to a Catholic school and she would have known about these rituals through other people who were not of her class, let's put it that way.

and they demanded always to be remembered.

Among the Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria, the water found its most formally celebrated expression in the figure of Oshun, the Orisha of the river, of love, of fertility, of sweet water.

Oshun is golden and gorgeous, associated with brass and amber, and the honey-colored light that falls across her wither at late afternoon.

She is a healer and a seductress, a mother and a figure of tremendous vanity, in the most human and endearing sense of that word.

She knows how beautiful she is.

She keeps a mirror.

She is fiercely protective of those she loves, and genuinely dangerous to those who disrespect her.

If you know Oshun, and then you encounter Mami Water for the first time, you will feel the family resemblance immediately.

You know, McDonald's for decades has been accused of destroying rainforests, you know, overharvesting the land, the way they treat cattle.

Wimsey, do you think it could even be Oshun?

Yeah, I mean, look, Oshun, the prophecies around Oshun and the feminine divine leaving the earth and how we must rise, you know, and save the feminine divine, that we will see drought, a receding of the waters and a receding of the bees and the, you know, animals dying in drought, the lack of water, the lack of resources.

All of these are warnings to us.

But we also see the revival of women coming back in really strong and powerful ways with strong female candidates in politics.

Who are they? Well that was the track River And they are the French-Cuban twin sisters.

And it ends with the prayer to Oshun, the Yoruba River Orisha spirit.

I think it's sung in Yoruba, if that's correct, if that's the name of the language.

I stand to be corrected on that.

right, I'm seeing actually these cards are put away a little bit.

I'm not gonna use the word wrong, but there's some faces of Oshun cards that are stuck in here as well, but that's okay.

It is what it needs to be.

Yeah, absolutely.

And it was what I needed.

And I engaged in ritual.

And then I gave myself an Oshun bath and You know, things happen, like people started booking readings for me.

And in the past three days or a few days, I've been reading for Black women who come from the Caribbean and I've been using your decks.