Running into Osun
by
Fernanda Villarroel Lamoza
Of her many names, Osun is the one that most explicitly grounds her in the river running through southwest Nigeria, also called Osun (Thompson 2001). Osun is an orisa, or a unique kind of deity (Drewal 1990) that is spiritually and etymologically intertwined with the Yoruba word for head, ori. For over six centuries, people have come to receive her blessings on the banks of the River Osun, at a shrine within a sacred forest in Osogbo, the current capital of Osun State and stronghold of the Ijesa, a Yoruba subgroup.
This essay is a brief reflection on the unforeseen offering that High Priestess Talabi Adedoyin Olosun Faniyi (Iya Doyin) invited me to prepare in December 2025 for Osun (figure 1). I was on a road trip with my mentor and revered Africanist Dr. Henry Drewal, revisiting the long-lasting friendships he assembled as a schoolteacher, apprentice carver, artist, researcher, and filmmaker between 1964 and 1986. The impromptu encounter with the everyday rituals to please Osun was not part of the itinerary. Yet such practices are uniquely restorative and healing in a world in constant disrepair, and I hope to illustrate how such fortunate encounters may occur beyond mere coincidence, at a time when shedding light on alternate ways of being seems more urgent than ever. Engagement with the orisas continues to be widely disavowed as make-believe or outright demonic; however, I draw on McKittrick’s notion of the demonic as simply that which lacks a knowable outcome (2006) to propose strategies for nourishing trust and embracing the unknown or the unanticipated.
Figure 1: High Priestess Talabi Adedoyin Olosun Faniyi (Iya Doyin) while preparing an offering by the Osun River December 12, 2025. Image by the Author
The River
It is hard to deny the river’s sacredness. Sacred means simply what has been set apart from ordinary life, and the surrounding forest literally endows the river with sacred qualities. About a mile from Osogbo’s palace and city center, the forest groves are now fully engulfed by the spiraling and intricate patterns distinctive of Yoruba cities, with scattered traces of decaying yet imposing Brazilian architecture.
Every August, as part of the Osun festival that marks the end of the rainy season, a young girl of royal descent, the arugba or calabash carrier, leads a procession of close to a hundred thousand people from the palace to deliver the community’s offerings to the river. She walks through the gate to the grove, where the road is framed on either side by the most extraordinary sculptural walls that expose Nigeria’s reddish, copper-rich soil and foreground interlacing figures of profound symbolism (figures 2 & 3). Their winding shapes veil secret passages to the numerous structures that, concealed within the forest’s cloak, house other orisas such as Shango and Oja, Obatala, Babalu Aye, Odu, and Iya Nla.
Since the 1960s, this sacred art-landscape has been restored and stewarded thanks to the collaboration of local artists such as Adebisi Akanji (1930-2023) with Susanne Wenger (1915-2009). Wenger first arrived in Nigeria in 1949 and was trained as an Austrian expressionist artist. However, her origins became peripheral to the fullness with which she embraced Yoruba spirituality in her lifework. She passed away peacefully in Osogbo in 2009, where she was known as Adunni Olorisa, a chieftaincy title.
Figure 2: Images of the walls surrounding the road to the grove. Left, sculpture of Osun with her many children. Right, shrine of Obatala. Images courtesy of the author
Iya Doyin
I have come to wonder about my intense familiarity with Osogbo, since I have only been there three times. It was during my first visit, while studying Yoruba at the University of Ibadan with a Fulbright Study Abroad Program in 2014, that I first met Iya Doyin. She was introduced to me as Susanne Wegner’s daughter. Eleven years later, I wanted Dr. Drewal to see Wegner’s house. Over a century old, rising three floors high, and almost completely embraced by a bright pink bougainvillea and framed by a fence of sculpted interlaced figures by Adebisi Akanji, Wenger’s house is one of Osogbo’s most precious treasures (Figure 3). Iya Doyin was the person to contact, but I did not have her number.
We found her contact information through friends of friends, and soon learned the house was closed for urgent renovations. Iya Doyin had moved with her numerous apprentices, or olorisas, to the outskirts of the city, and she was just returning from giving a lecture on spirituality at Harvard. We waited for her on the porch. When she arrived, we were both taken aback by the sweetness of her presence; we even forgot we had been waiting for a very long time. She was fully draped in white lace, a red feather sneaking out of her gele and marking the center of her forehead, resembling the red feather that is usually worn by Esu, the ruler of crossroads, who mediates all human interactions with the orisa (Thompson 1984).
Iya Doyin recognized Dr. Drewal immediately from a brief encounter at a New York City intersection in 2011, when he stopped to greet her with proper Yoruba decorum and reverence. What are the odds of such an encounter, and even then, for one to remember? Dr. Drewal later told me that he recalled wanting to acknowledge that he recognized she was no ordinary Yoruba woman. She was distinguished by the scarification on her face and her attire, including her heavy bead arrangements in colors that demonstrate a person’s affiliation to various orisas.
Iya Doyin explained that she was dressed in white for the orisa Obatala; it was his day in the traditional four-day week. The following day was Osun’s. Because I am initiated and a devotee of Osun, she offered me the opportunity to join them the next day to take an offering to the river.
Figure 3: Susanne’s Wenger House, with fence by Adebisi Akanji. December 2025, Image by the Author
Feeding Osun
The next morning, we met Iya Doyin on Wenger’s porch. She arrived in a van, with her brother, a driver, and three young women wearing impeccable white with yellow details, one of them with a baby girl tied to her back. Iya Doyin brought me a bronze bracelet and beads to consecrate in the river: five long strands of yellow beads, because, as she explained, five is her number; two strands of green beads, because they are unique to the Osun of Osogbo, evoking the thick sacred forest.
We drove to the grove’s entrance, each olorisa carrying a calabash on her head filled with various items, including a large clay pot of asaro, or yam porridge, that looked delicious and must have taken forever to cook. I have been on my own since I was young, and I am not used to receiving or expecting kindness and care. Iya Doyin and the olorisas’ simple yet wholehearted kindness made me uneasy and aware that I was accepting something no money could repay. My sense of unsettledness increased while Iya Doyin fed bananas to the many monkeys at the threshold. Dr. Drewal had lunch plans with friends he had known for 55 years, and we were already late. Still, everything was done slowly and with immense care. “We always start by feeding the monkeys,” Iya Doyin explained. A few minutes can be a long time. I have learned that it takes a while to enter a sacred space, even when it is right there, yet my body never fails to resist.
Eventually, we walked barefoot down to the bank of the river, offering prayers to Esu and other orisas and the Osun priestesses in the shrine. Iya Doyin laid a yellow scarf on a tree root and asked me to sit next to her; everyone else organically settled into a circle. She consulted the sacred kola nuts, and afterwards I prayed, holding them to my head, and then to my heart, three times. We offered Osun water, gin, and then the asaro from the calabash. Iya Doyin described this offering as “vegetarian” because Osun famously likes blood. I got my period that day and thought that would suffice.
Osun’s is ultimately the realm of life and death, the realm of our mothers. Yet taking life is the secular state’s core prohibition, and animal offerings are invariably deemed demonic or evil. In Nigeria, however, the state is of little consequence. Death is no stranger to anyone, with life expectancy hovering at around 55 years. Chickens and goats are often sold alive, and animal offerings are often translated as sacrifices, feeding the gods, but also entire communities. In a critical reenactment of a reckoning with our own mortality, the otherwise ordinary slaughtering of an animal for food is honored as a reminder of how our own existence depends, in one way or the other, on taking life from others. Feeding the gods (the invisible) is thus a central aspect of feeding people (the social), as flesh of the same flesh.
Figure 4: Offering to Osun, Photograph courtesy of Dr. Henry Drewal
The Olorisas of Osun
Iya Doyin requested blessings, calling Ore yeye Osun (Great Mother Osun); we responded, Ore yeye o. While she uttered the call for blessings, the priestesses responded in turn, ringing their bells, every sentence punctuated by a collectively articulated Ase. Growing up in a Catholic country like Chile, my understanding of prayer was something you do in silence and secrecy; here, it was loud, explicit, and often heart-wrenching. Even with my limited understanding of Yoruba, I was moved. The words’ meanings were much less relevant than the material traces they left behind, their sound, resonance, and vibrational quality.
After Dr. Drewal and his friends left, we sat at the bank of the river for hours, praying, throwing kola, receiving blessings, chatting, eating asaro, collecting water in plastic jerry cans, and discussing what was happening in the groves that day, the health of children, and other personal matters. By the time I fed my offering to the river, it felt so good. Every handful of yam porridge that sank into the water took with it whatever burden I was carrying. Iya Doyin prayed on my head and consecrated my beads in the river. I washed my face and feet in the cool water before leaving.
How to distinguish whether an affliction is spiritual or merely physical? In the US, spiritual afflictions are rarely explicitly referenced; they are masked with labels like mental health. In Nigeria, on the other hand, spiritual afflictions are a widespread concern, expanding way beyond people’s engagements with the orisas, which are demonized by charismatic churches, on the one hand, and colonial disavowal, on the other. That said, every orisa does not exist in the mind but in concrete elements of a particular landscape, equipped to assist with a wide range of physical and spiritual matters. Ifa is an oracle; consulting him through an expert can assist with crucial decision-making and aligning with your life path. Yet Osun is a river, and an olorisa of Osun will offer something quite different. To begin with, she is never alone, but always part of a multitude.
Iya means mother, and this is the title used to address the devotees of Osun. Becoming a mother implies renouncing a singular being to embrace being with and for your children, not as a function of biological birth, or even through a female body. In the case Iya Doyin, she was born into Osun through her father, who was a devotee. There are many ways in which Osun can call you in, at any time, irrespective of your background or birthright. I did not hesitate to give in to the orisas because I had no roots to hold me otherwise — to a country, a family, or a self. Yet the solitude of an orphan need not be a life sentence. This encounter with Osun fell on what would have been my mother’s 70th birthday. She passed at 63.
I first met Iya Doyin as Susanne Wenger’s daughter. I reconnected with her more than a decade later as a mother to numerous young women she had taken into her house, including me. You do not count your children, she explained, “because all the children in my house are mine.” Wenger gave birth to no biological children and, nevertheless, was the mother of many. The labor of the olorisas—washing, cooling, and feeding offerings to the river—contributes to what Amber Musser describes as situating the mother not as a void but an elsewhere. We should, therefore, think of a mother as a condition of possibility simultaneously present and absent, yet able to question and restore the very nature of love and kin.
References
McKittrick, Katherine. 2006. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. University of Minnesota Press.
Drewal, Henry John. 1983. Gẹlẹdẹ: Art and Female Power Among the Yoruba. Indiana University Press, 1983.
------, Pemberton III John, Rowland Abiodun, and Allen Wardwell. 1990. Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought. Harry N Abrams Inc.
------, Drewal, and John Mason. 1997. Beads, Body, and Soul: Art & Light in the Yoruba Universe. UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History,
McKittrick, Katherine. 2006. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. University of Minnesota Press.
Musser, Amber. 2018. Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance. New York University Press.
Thompson, Robert Farris. 1984. Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy. Vintage.
Thompson, Robert Farris. 2001. “Orchestrating Water and the Wind: Oshun’s Art in Atlantic Context.” In Osun across the Waters: A Yoruba Goddess in Africa and the Americas, edited by Joseph M. Murphy and Mei-Mei Sanford. Indiana University Press.