Oya

Oya is the orisha of the wind, the storm and sudden change, a powerful and formidable spirit associated with the great River Niger, with the lightning that she shares with her husband Shango, and with the gate of the cemetery, where she stands between the living and the dead. She is a warrior, one of the fiercest of the orisha, who rides into battle at Shango's side, and she is the whirlwind and the tempest, the sudden, sweeping force that transforms a situation in an instant, tearing down what stands and clearing the way for the new. Change, especially abrupt and drastic change, is her element: she is the storm-front that arrives without warning, and she is invoked in times of upheaval and transformation, whether feared or sought. Her association with the cemetery gate and with the boundary between the living and the dead gives her a further role as a spirit who guards the threshold of death, standing at the very edge of the world of the living; she is connected with the ancestral dead and with the winds that carry the spirits. She is often associated with the number nine and with the marketplace, and her colours and offerings vary across the different lineages and communities that honour her.

Like the other orisha, Oya was carried across the Atlantic by enslaved Yoruba and preserved in the diaspora religions of Cuba and Brazil, where practitioners have associated her with Catholic figures such as Our Lady of Candelaria or Saint Theresa. These are living religions, practised with devotion today across West Africa and the Americas, and Oya is among their most powerful spirits, the orisha of the wind and the storm, of lightning and the whirlwind, of the sudden change that sweeps away the old, and of the gate between the living and the dead.

Among the specific claims made about Oya's authority is an unusual one concerning the egungun, the masked ancestral spirits paraded through Yoruba towns in elaborate ceremonies from which women are traditionally barred, on pain of serious taboo, from looking upon or touching the masquerade. Oya is the standing exception.

Tradition holds that she alone among women has seen what lies beneath the egungun costume and lived, some versions saying she once lifted the cloth of a masquerader in her own household out of curiosity or grief and found her own dead husband beneath it, and rather than punishing this transgression the ancestors granted her lasting authority over the masquerade cult itself, so that egungun ceremonies are placed under her patronage even though their day to day exclusion of women continues, her name being invoked as the sanctioned exception rather than a challenge to the rule.

Historically the market women of Yoruba towns, a powerful and organized economic class in Oyo and neighbouring polities, also claimed Oya as their particular patroness, a pairing of the goddess of sudden upheaval with women who controlled the volatile business of trade. The combination, ancestral masquerade and marketplace commerce, both governed by one female orisha in domains otherwise dominated by men, marks Oya as a figure whose power was specifically defined by crossing boundaries other members of her society could not.