Yemayá: the blue womb of the tides

The mother of salt water

If Oshún is the youth of the river, Yemayá is the maturity of the ocean, the immense womb from which all life on Earth emerged. She is the queen of the salt waters, the great mother whose dresses are made of white foam and waves of a blue so deep it borders on the night. Her character is as vast and changing as the sea she rules: one moment she is the gentle lull of the tide lapping the sand of the beach, comforting the afflicted; the next, she is the violent undertow that drags ships into the abyss and shatters cliffs with the strength of a wounded giant.

She is considered the mother of most of the Orishas, the one who nursed them at her generous breast and who watches over their paths with the zeal of a sea lioness. Her energy is linked to the moon, which responds to her calls by raising and lowering the tides according to her moods. For Yemayá, all human beings are her legitimate children, as each of them spent their first months of existence suspended in the salt water of the mother's womb.

The birth of the waters of the world

In the beginning of time, Yemayá lived in the highlands, but her power was so overflowing that her body could not contain the amount of water she carried inside. One day, beset by the tensions of the earthly and spiritual worlds, her womb opened in a cataclysm of cosmic proportions. From her body gushed the rivers, lagoons, and seas, flooding the dry valleys and creating the planet's oceans.

With the torrent of her waters, the deities of the hunt, war, disease, and wind were also born. She not only gave birth to the gods, but also assigned them their domains, ensuring that each had a place in the order of the world. Since then, the sea has been her palace, a realm of silence and twilight where she guards the oldest secrets of creation, sunken treasures, and the bones of those who dared to defy her immensity without showing her proper respect.

The protector of lost souls

Yemayá is the deity of comfort and mental stability. Her head is the temple of sanity; when the storms of life break the spirit of men, it is to her they turn to regain their balance. Her dance is majestic: she moves spinning around herself like the waves of the ocean, mimicking the swaying of the water, opening her arms to welcome the helpless and sweeping away with her wide skirts the impurities and bad energies of those who approach her shore.

She wears a necklace of seven strands of blue and white glass beads, and her tool is the *Agbé*, a fan made of peacock feathers and decorated with seashells that she uses to cool fevered brows. She is the patroness of fishermen, sailors, and all those who must cross the waters to survive. Throughout history, when slave ships crossed the Atlantic laden with men stripped of their land, Yemayá traveled with them beneath the keels of the ships, cushioning the blows of the waves and gathering the souls of those who fell into the water to return their freedom to them in the depths of her kingdom.