LaSyrenn, the Mermaid, is an aspect of Ezili, is the Divine Feminine of Haitian Vodou. There is one Ezili, but there are also seven, twenty one, seventy seven, and so on, as she refracts, rainbow-like, into her spectrum of aspects. All Ezili, at heart, are water spirits, originating in name from Lake Azili in modern day Benin.
It’s common for the spirits of individual bodies of water to be female in West Africa. There, the spirit is indistinguishable from the body of water: you go to the lake or river to visit it. Once the people who had a relationship with that spirit were uprooted, the spirit traveled with them to an alien place and became more generalized, more all-encompassing; not just about one lake or river, but about all rivers, all waters, and all the properties of water.
Water flows, cleanses, reflects, refracts, makes slippery, transports, dissolves, evaporates, erodes, rains down, cools, gives relief from gravity. Water, as a liquid, takes on the shape of its container. Water refreshes, soothes, and renews. And water is in a state of constant flux: drawn up by the moon, sweated, cried, drunk, sighed out. Water manifests with a range of emotion from the gentlest dewdrop to the most destructive tornado. It runs through everything. We are 90% water, and so is everything else that is alive. Even as we walk on dry land, we’re all floating in the ever-present water, permeated and interconnected by it.
Ezili was and is, as a lake in Benin and as the supreme feminine being at large, all that water is: all of this fluidity and motion, all of this receptivity and reflectiveness, all of this ubiquitousness and power.
Add salt to water, and you have the constituents of life. Creatures construct their shells from salt, and then dissolve into water once again. The stable cubic molecule of salt, once surrendered to the water, has the ability to shed and swap electrons, swapping impulses and information in the process. Dry salt waits patiently for water, and eagerly gives itself up when the water envelops it. Salty tears, salty urine, salty blood, salty amniotic fluid… all salty because of the mineral constituents of life, salty because salt, once dissolved, transgresses barriers, barriers of blood, barriers of neurons. Signaling back and forth across membranes, it controls what comes through, not with rigidity, but with impulse, with communication.
Add the salt and the vastness of the sea to the essence of Ezili, and you have another West African spirit, Mami Wata. She is (or perhaps, they are, for Mami Wata, like Ezili, is both singular and manifold), the spirit (or spirits) of both the sea and of wealth. Like salt, wealth can be liquidated and precipitated and liquidated over and over again. It’s worth nothing of hoarded, left to dry up in a heap on the shore. If dissolved, exchanged, tossed lightly by the waves of life, it is everything. Wealth is hidden under the waves.
The wealth of the sea is also spiritual. Girls are taken under the sea to be initiated by Mami Wata, disappearing for days on end, coming back changed, with longer, straighter hair, better luck, and a deep knowing. They know the world on the other side of the mirror, a parallel dimension that has everything our world has. The sea is intuition, transmitting salty impulses from the unconscious to the conscious. The sea is imagination, crystalizing the residue of our memories into the forms of our dreams to speak anew, and then washing them away again.
Into this land of water spirits glides the massive, voluptuous, (perhaps deceptively) seductive figure of a mermaid, carved into the prow of a European ship. She is smiling and beautiful, her hair curling in waves behind her, her breasts bared forward. She is familiar and inviting, but heralds the arrival of slave traders; the wealth-building capacity of the sea turned brutally murderous. The elites of the kingdoms of West Africa, those with the power to make treaties and hand lives over, saw her as a herald of wealth. The less fortunate were thrown behind her, into the ship’s hold, and dragged to an unimaginable new world of horror. Some jumped ship on the way, plummeting to Mami Wata’s initiatory depths and remaining there forever, only to speak back through the mirror.
LaSyrenn is all of this. She combs her long hair that moves like seaweed under the waves, loosening it from the bounds of gravity. She gazes into the mirror at her reflection: which is which, which is the terrestrial body, and which is the undersea double? Either way, she is amphibious, one eye in the watery world of dreams and intuition, one peering, bobbing above like a manatee, at the humans in their ships, in their dry illusions of safety. She drips with wealth, with pearls, the riches that condense from the salt of the sea.
LaSyrenn is at once unseparable from her husband Mèt Agwe, the lord of the seas (sometimes embodied as a boat bobbing on her vast waters) and mysterious and aloof to him. She also maintains a paradoxical relationship with her counterpart, La Balenn, The Whale, who lives in the dark, unknowable depths of the ocean. Is La Balenn her other spouse? Is La Balenn a part of her? Or her child? Her parent? In any case, she disappears into the abyss occasionally. But she always returns.
Would you like to know more about LaSyrenn, Agwè, Mami Wata, La Balenn and the other ocean mysteries of Haitian Vodou? I’ll be giving a class in the Sea Mysteries through Mictlan Academy soon, subscribe to their Patreon for access to it and classes about other lwa!
