From the House of Yemanja: The Goddess Heritage of Black Women.
The Spiritual Conscious Creator / Activist Library
Image credit: https://yemanjalove.wordpress.com/
By Sabrina Sojourner ❤ the title is taken from a poem by Audre Lorde, “From the house of Yemanja”, in The Black Unicorn (New York: W.W. Norton & Co.,1978).
It is difficult, if not impossible, to be raised in the United States without having Christian value judgments invade one’s life. Until recent times, it was doubly hard for Black Americans to escape this intrusion because of the intrinsic political and social, as well as religious, role the Black church has played in our community. It was only as late as my parent’s generation that countless Black women and men began leaving the church, no longer believing in the salvation offered by a white god and savior. Now many women of my own generation are discovering that God is not only not white, but she also was never been considered male until relatively recently!
RECLAIMING OUR SPIRITUAL MOTHER
Seboulisa mother goddess with one breast
eaten away by worms of sorrow and loss
see me now
your severed daughter
laughing our name into echo
all the world shall remember. _Audre Lorde (1)❤
The lack of information about Black Goddesses in most works on Goddess worship might lead one to believe that such information does not exist. This simply is not so! We of African descent have a rich Goddess and matrifocal heritage. While it is true that many tribes maintained a kingship for centuries before the notion of written history, more often than not, the king received his legitimacy from a magic-sacerdotal female clan. In other instances, the power of the king was channeled through the figure of a “dowager queen” or wifely queen. With some tribes, the kinship was not a position desired by most men because the king was ritually murdered every six months to a year (2).
The information I have gathered about African Goddesses, heroines, and Amazons is a synthesis of bits and pieces of information from a variety of sources. The following profiles are taken primarily from the works of Three women: Merlin Stone(3), Audre Lorde (4), and Helen Diner (5).
Yemanja is the mother goddess of the Orisha and, as such, is related to Mawu. Yemanja is the Goddess of the Oceans; rivers are said to flow from Her breast. River-smoothed stones are Her symbol. The sea is sacred to Her followers. In Brazil, She is worshipped as Iamanja and is honored on the eve of Summer Solstice. ❤
Mawu is known as the creator of the Universe. As a mother of the Vodu, She is related to Yemanja. Another form of Mawu is that of Mawulisa (Mawu-Lisa), the inseparable twins of the Universe. For the Dahomean people, Mawulisa is the female-male (divine Feminine-Divine Masculine), sky goddess-god principle, also represented as west-east,night-day,moon-sun. Where she is known as Mawu, Lisa is called either Her first son/consort or Her twin brother. Other manifestations of Mawu are Seboulisa and Sogbo.
Ala is a goddess of the Ibo people of Nigeria. She is called the provider of life and the mother who receives again in death. It is Ala who proclaims the law that is the basis for all moral human behavior. It is a Nigerian custom to have life-size images of Ala sitting on the porch of a small wooden house in the village visible to all who pass by.
Jezanna is the Goddess of the Moshona people of Zimbabwe. Her symbol is the moon and Her high priestess is Her primary representative.
Songi is the Great Mother of the Bantu of central and southern Africa. A sacred legend holds that Nsomeka, a young woman, met Mother Songi in the forest one day. Songi notched Nsomeka’s teeth. That evening, from the notches, sprang forth livestock, fruit trees, houses, and shade trees. When the men of the village beat their wives for not producing these things for them, Nsomeka gathered all the women in her field and notched their teeth. None of the men could join them until they had promised to treat the women with respect.
Mboze is the First Mother of the Woyo people of Zaire. Her sacred story expresses women’s attempts to keep tradition in the face of betrayal. Mboze has a daughter, Bunzi, by Her son/lover, Makanga. When Her husband, Kuitilkuiti (who had changed his black skin for white), learns that Makanga is the father, he beats Mboze to death. Bunzi grows older to do the work Her mother had once done, rewarding the faithful with bountiful rains and harvests.
Mbaba Mwana Waresa is the goddess of the Zulu people of Natal. Among Her gifts, this holy Rain Goddess of the Heavens also gave Her people beer so that they might better celebrate their joyous times.
Tji-wara (Or Chi-Wara) is said to have introduced agriculture to the Bambara people. A good harvest is assured through pleasing Her. ❤
AFRICAN AMAZON OF THE GODDESS LANDS
As with Amazon cultures of Goddess-oriented Anatolia, much of what we know about the Amazons of Libya (a term that once referred to all of Africa) centers around their fierceness as warriors. Through legend, mythology, and historical facts, we know of Merina(6), for instance, and her peaceful march east through Egypt. Once in Syria, she conquered the Arabs, settlement after settlement. She led her Amazon troops through Phrygia and up the coast of the Mediterranean.
In their path of triumph, they founded towns and colonies. Lesbos and other eastern Mediterranean islands are said to have fallen to Merina. Cast ashore at Samothrace after a terrific storm, Merina named the island and erected a temple to the Mother-Goddess (probably Neith), celebrated mysteries in Her honor, built altars, and made sacrifices. These were all in accordance with a vow she has taken during her hour of peril(7).
The trek to Samothrace had been long and arduous. Their exhaustion benefited Greek forces led by Mompsus, a Thracian, and Sypylus, a Scythian. At their hands, Merina was defeated and killed, ending the ferocious nation of Libyan Amazons. Most of her followers returned to North Africa. There they continued to honor Neith. The Libyan Amazons also worshipped Pallas Athena and Pallas Promochos, the Vanguard Goddess, like their goddess. As before the death of Merina, women were expected to remain virgins (unmarried) while in active service (8).
REVIVAL OF YORUBAN THEOLOGY AMONG BLACK AMERICAN WOMEN
The African belief in a pantheon of goddesses and gods did not die when the Africans were brought to the “New World”; merely changed. Traces of Yoruban culture survive in the West Indies, the United States, and South America. In the late Sixties, transmitters of tradition began to be sought out by Black intellectuals wanting to reclaim a lost part of their spiritual heritage. Now a third group has emerged; women who are challenging the present patriarchal structure of the religion.
It is their belief that half-truths and false taboos have been imposed on them and the Yoruban manifestations of the Goddess, that undue power has been placed in the hands of men, and that it is their duty as the daughters of Yemanja, Oshun, and Oya to restore their mothers as the heads of the House and regain respect for women.
Two such women are Luisah Teish and Robin Pearson. Teish has lived in the San Francisco bay area since 1971. she was not born in the Yoruban culture, but does approach it completely as an outsider; during her childhood in the Delta region of Louisiana, remnants of it were all around her. Her formal interest began in the mid-sixties when she began dancing with Katherine Dunham. Upon her arrival in the Bay Arc, Teish started teaching Afro-Haitian dance. Since much of the dance is rooted in religion, Teish also provided her classes with information about the religious culture. In 1977 she started teaching classes on the Yoruban goddesses, mostly to women.
Teish believes that Oshun, the Yoruban goddess of love, beauty, and female power, has been wronged by contemporary patriarchs of the Yoruban culture. “Oshun is usually depicted as the very delicate, very conceited and jealous female,” observes Teish; but many aspects of this goddess are kept hidden. For instance, Teish explains, “We are told that Oshun’s bird is the peacock whose only value is its outward appearance. However, if you listen carefully, you may also hear Her associated with vulture”. Teish adds with a sly smile, “and we all know how powerful the jaws and the claws of vulture are”.
Robin Pearson lives in Jamaica Plains, Massachusetts. LikebTeish, Pearson was not born into the Yoruban culture. She joined a communal house in the mid-seventies that is oriented toward female spirituality. Pearson has since left the strictly ordered house and is working on her own. Both she and Teish hope to become priestesses; the complex ceremony of initiation can span five years. Because the initiators have tremendous influence with women who keep the old ways and return to this country to open feminist Yoruba houses, centers that again will honor the Mother and Her daughters.
REDEFINING OUR SPIRITUAL HERITAGE
I come like a woman
who I am
spreading out through nights
laughter and promise
and dark heat
warming whatever I touch
that is living
consuming
only
What is already dead. _Audre Lorde (9).
The Africans who adopted Christianity maintained their African spiritual sensibilities. Thus, with their conversion began the tapestry of Black theology and folk religion, compromised of threads of African religions and culture, Western civilization, and Christianity. It is colored with the practices, rituals, and philosophies of white, Christian theology, and the African tradition that religion permeates all aspects of life with no final distinctions between what is secular and what is sacred(10).
It is the latter aspect that accounts for the spiritual aspect of Black art, theater, music, and literature. This is why, even though raised outside the Church, there is rarely a Black individual who does not understand the Church’s significance to the Black culture and community. Black theology and folk religion, like traditional African religions, seeks the power of the spirit of God (Divine Energy) in all times and places and things; without that power, one is helpless (11).
Because the Church has succeeded in providing for its community a “heaven on earth” — a sense of joy in the face of adversity — it has maintained its central position. By attuning yourself to the Spirit, or its manifestations, you become one with that power. Thus, when Black Christians talk about putting themselves in the hands of God, they are generally referring to their need, desire, or ability to tap into a divine source of energy and utilize that energy to push/pull themselves through a situation. This is not much different from the Pagan process of channeling energy, which many women are reviving today.
Perhaps the Amazons who rode into Europe from the Russian steppes were fierce, blonde, blue-eyed women. My Amazons have always been dark. It is not easy growing up in a society whose language and laws fear, despise, and dehumanize the rainbow of people who are of darker hues. It is not easy trusting alliance with women who continue a status quo negation of one’s racial/cultural/ethnic/class background. The dark-skinned women who rode, thousands strong, across the African continent and through the Arab world are my reminder that I am the ancestral daughter/sister of a powerful nation of women.
Whether their battles were merely for the sport and spoils of war or for the preservation of Mother Right is immaterial. It is their fight and strength that I cling to. For me, this image has been an amazing source of courage, conviction, and freedom.
Improving the quality of women’s lives around the world requires more than economic and/or political theory. It is my hope that as more and more Third World women read Diner, Stone, Lorde, and others, they will begin to fill in the names,, rituals, and deeds — the realities — of the Goddess-worshipping and Woman-honoring cultures of our ancestors. I long for discussion of spiritual, as well as economic and political, structures among Third World women, among all women.
Source:
https://bookshop.org/a/11781/9780385172417
Hope this helps understand deeper your own feminine divinity plus continue to do your own research about your ancestors and continue to decolonize everything. Know thyself. This essay was one of my favorites from this book. ❤
Notes:
Audre Lord, “125th Street and Abomey”, The black Unicorn (New York: W.W. Norton &Co., 1978), p.12.
Helen Diner, Mother and Amazons: The First Feminine History of Culture (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1973), pp. 177–181.
Merlin Stone, When God Was a Woman (New York: The Dial Press, 1976) and Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood: our Goddess and Heroine Heritage (New York: Sibylline Books, 1979/80).
Audre Lorde, The Black Unicorn.
Helen diner, op. cit.
Merina is most widely known as Myrine, her greek name, but the former is her Libyan name.
Guy Cadogan Rothery, The Amazons in Antiquity and Modern Times (London: Francis Griffiths, 1910), p. 113.
See Rothery, p. 113, and Diner, pp. 108–109.
Audre Lorde, “The women of Dan Dance with Swords in their hands to Mark the time when they were warriors”, The black unicorn, p. 14.
Joseph R. Washington, Jr., Black Sect and Cults (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/ Doubleday, 1973), p. 20.
Ibid.
New reading cards from ancient Egyptian spirit guide messages! This was divinely naturally guided. Hope it helps as this reading is definitely for the collective healing of DM + DF. ❤
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In solidarity, sovereignty, and neutrality with you, today and always.
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Love _AO🦋
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