From the House of Yemanja: The Goddess Heritage of Black Women.
The Spiritual Conscious Creator / Activist Library
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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…
