Mami Wata, the name means Mother Water, is a water spirit, or a whole family of water spirits, venerated across much of West, Central and Southern Africa and throughout the African diaspora. She is imagined as a strikingly beautiful woman, often with the lower body of a fish, or accompanied or entwined by a great snake, holding a mirror and a comb, attributes of beauty, vanity and self-regard, and also of the mirror as a passage between worlds. She is a spirit of the waters, the sea, the rivers, the lagoons, and, like deep water itself, she is at once alluring and dangerous, generous and perilous. She is strongly associated with wealth: Mami Wata can bring sudden prosperity, money and success to those she favours, but her gifts come at a price and her favour is capricious, and she can as readily bring misfortune, madness or ruin to those who break faith with her or who are drawn too far into her world. Her worship takes many forms across the wide territory in which she is honoured, and she readily absorbs new imagery: it is well documented, for example, that a popular image of Mami Wata across Africa was shaped in part by an imported nineteenth-century printed picture of a female snake-charmer, which devotees recognised as their water spirit and adopted, a striking instance of the tradition's openness and its capacity to take up and remake new materials. Mami Wata belongs to living religious cultures across Africa and the diaspora, where she is served with genuine devotion; she is the beautiful, ambivalent spirit of the waters, the giver of wealth and beauty, and the dangerous mother of the deep, whose favour is sought and whose power is treated with respect.