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Oshun, the Yorùbá goddess of love celebrated through an installation and multidisciplinary art show personifying the deity. Patrons experience self-love as transformation through interactive play with sensory stations. As the goddess of love and sweet freshwater, Oshun is the queen of witches, healers, and a teacher of magic, medicine, and mysticism. She casts spells associated with romance, seduction, prosperity, and fertility. She grants the wishes and desires of our hearts when called upon with respect and adoration. She is the quintessential essence of love, sweetness, humor, confidence, and cheer. To cherish Oshun, we acknowledge she manifests herself through “sensuality” where life is encountered through the five senses, “touch”, “taste”, “smell”, “sight”, and “hearing”. 

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Black women from the beginning of time have birthed society, they have mothered the world’s children, tended to the sick; as Oshun is known for excellent cooking skills, fed the poor, worked other people’s kitchens, and still nourished their own families with love and affection. Yoruba elders say that Oshun is the "unseen mother present at every gathering,” because, in Yoruba, Oshun is the cosmological forces of water, moisture, and attraction. Hence,  she is all - present and universal. Yoruba griots prompt us that "no one is an enemy to water" and thus everyone has need of and should honor, appreciate and channel Oshun to manifest and facilitate their pure bliss as they should the Black woman.

 

Oshun, also spelled, Osun, Oxun, Oshoun, Oxum, Ochun, is given reverence because she rules the rivers that sustain life and fresh water is necessary to live. Throughout the African Diaspora, when millions of Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas and the Caribbean Islands in the Atlantic slave trade, she crossed with them.  She acquired new names: Oxum in Brazil, Ochun in Cuba, and Erzulie-Freda-Dahomey in Haiti. She is also manifested in the Brazilian religion of Candomblé, which keeps close connections with the Yoruba religion, as well as Cuban Santeriá. Consequently, everywhere traveled, Oshun empowers passion, sexual attraction, love, fertility, abundance, and healing in her devotees.

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As self-love is the foundation of the love we all seek, it starts from within. She also teaches us to embrace our sexuality as a source from the divine. She encourages us to commune with nature, especially at the source of fresh water. She implores us to connect with the feminine and yin energy we all have within us and allow love, tenderness, and compassion to be a source of strength and assets in living our lives with the spirit and sentiments of Oshun. Channeling Oshun seeks to douse you in melanin, share wombs full of stories and secrets of the true Source of love. In the process, present an alternative view of the colonialistic, sexist paradigm that has been forced upon our existence. Synonymous, with transformation channel Oshun, a Divine Goddess to reclaim what you hunger to express to satiate your eternal joy. 

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Oshun’s Prayer

 

Ide were were nita ochun

Ide were were

Ide were were nita ochun

Ide were were nita ya

Ocha kiniba nita ochun

Cheke cheke cheke

Nita ya Ide were were.