Oshun, known in the Cuban Lukumí tradition as Ochún, is always with me. She is the orisha of love, fresh water, beauty, and fertility in the Yoruba religious tradition of West Africa, a tradition that is very much alive today, carried by initiated priests and priestesses, scholars, and devotees across Nigeria, Brazil, Cuba, Trinidad, and far beyond. Each May, I set aside time to learn more and deepen my relationship with her. What I offer here is my own devotional reflection on one of her great stories. It is not instruction, and it is not authoritative. It is simply what this myth has taught me, and what I believe it continues to say to the world.
Olodumare sends seventeen
In the beginning, before the rivers ran and before anything breathed, Olodumare looked upon the vast formless earth and sent seventeen orishas down to complete the work of creation.
Sixteen were male. The seventeenth was Oshun.
She was the only female orisha among them, and the youngest. When they arrived on earth the sixteen set about establishing their domains. They cleared the grove for Oro (guardian of sacred law). They secured the abode of Eégún (the ancestral dead). Each of the sixteen, from Eji-Ogbe and Oyeku Meji through to Orangun Meji and all the rest, made provision for himself. They made no provision for Oshun.
She is known by another name in this story. Seegesi, the preeminent hair-plaiter with the coral-beaded comb. And so that is what she did. She sat quietly, took up her comb, and watched them.
What they did not know, what they had not thought to ask, was that she was àje. In Yoruba understanding, àje is the innate spiritual power carried by women, a force so fundamental that the tradition says simply: all women are àje. The sixteen had set aside the one who held this power, assuming the world would cooperate.
The world that would not hold
The world did not cooperate.
The sixteen tried everything. They went to Eégún’s grove and pleaded with him to let their mission succeed. They appealed to Oro, who frightens Death and Sickness, to drive them away. Healing failed. Epidemic festered instead. They begged Ose to let the rain fall. Rain did not fall.
They went to Oshun. She received them warmly and entertained them. But shame would not let them confide in her, the one they had ignored, and so they left without asking what they had come to ask.
They returned to Olodumare and reported that their mission had failed. Olodumare asked how many of them were present. Sixteen, they said. And when you left heaven, how many were you? Seventeen, they said.
Olodumare did not soften what came next. You are all intriguers. That one you left behind, if you do not bring her here, there will be no solution to your problem. If you continue this way, you will always fail.
They returned to Oshun. They addressed her by her full title: Mother, the preeminent hair-plaiter with the coral-beaded comb. They told her what Olodumare had revealed, that all Odu were derived from her, that their suffering would continue for as long as they failed to recognise and obey her.
Oshun listened. And then she set her conditions.
She was expecting a child, and the fate of creation would depend on that child’s gender. If the baby were male, she would send him out with them to complete their mission. If the baby were female, she would have nothing further to do with them. Before they could respond, she turned to the matter of everything they had eaten and celebrated without her, every feast, every offering, every he-goat consumed while she sat apart with her comb. She had kept account of all of it. As the full weight of that reckoning gathered into a curse, Ose stepped forward and covered her mouth.
The sixteen could do nothing now but wait and pray. They prayed that Oshun would deliver a male child. They begged her.
When Oshun delivered, the child was a boy. And through him, through the child of the one they had dismissed, the work of creation was finally able to begin.
What we call soft: the power Oshun carries
It is worth pausing before moving from the myth into its meaning, because this version of the story is more demanding than the one we usually hear.
Oshun does not simply forgive. She does not meet their apology with open arms and pour out her waters in relief. She negotiates. She reminds them of every exclusion, every feast held without her. She is on the verge of cursing them when Ose intervenes. The resolution hangs on the gender of an unborn child, and the sixteen spend that waiting time in prayer, hoping she will show them mercy they have not earned.
This is àje, the innate spiritual power carried by women, the capacity to give life and, equally, to withhold it. This is the power the sixteen did not account for, and it is the detail the myth insists we sit with. The world was not saved by Oshun’s graciousness. It was saved because she chose, on her own terms, to allow it to be.
Oshun is the vital source of all good things. Without her sanction, no healing can take place, no rain can fall, no plants can bear fruit, and no children can come into the world. The things she governs — love, beauty, tenderness, sweetness, the quality of how we treat one another — are not pleasant additions to a world that is otherwise functioning. They are the conditions under which the world functions at all. And yet they are persistently described as secondary, as the kind of thing we can afford to consider once the real work is done. Whole categories of human labour built on exactly these qualities — caring for children, tending to the sick, holding families and communities together — are among the least valued and worst compensated in nearly every society on earth. We have built institutions, systems, and entire civilisations on the assumption that these qualities are supplementary, that the world can be constructed first and given sweetness afterwards.
The myth of Oshun directly answers that assumption. The sixteen did not fail because they lacked intelligence, ambition, or strength. They failed because they had excluded the one thing that could actually bring the world to life. And this is the detail the story insists on: they did not merely struggle without her. The world became categorically impossible. Everything fell away.
We tend to speak about the undervaluing of care and tenderness as an injustice, which it is, but the myth frames it as something more fundamental than that. It frames it as a cosmological error, a mistake at the level of how reality works. The world cannot hold without what Oshun carries. That is the structure of things.
Sweetness is not the opposite of power
Oshun agreed to help, in the end, but the terms were hers. The waters flow because she chose to let them flow. Through her, creation received what it had been missing. As the vital source of all good things, Oshun brought beauty, fertility, love, and sweetness into the world, weaving them into the nature of every living thing that drew breath under Olodumare’s sky.
This is what the story insists on, quietly and without apology. What is tender is consequential. What is loving is powerful. The world was completed by the one they had dismissed, through a child she carried in her own body, on conditions she set herself. The instrument of creation was everything they had decided could wait.
The earth holds us still. That is her doing.
The oldest mistake in the world
The sixteen orishas were capable and determined, and their world was still dust. They tried every force available to them, and the world refused every one. It was only when they came to Oshun, fully, with genuine recognition of what they had done and who she was, that anything became possible. And even then, she made them wait.
We can see the same cost running through the world today. We can see it in institutions that are efficient but inhospitable, in systems that function but do not nourish, and in lives that are productive but somehow hollow. The thing missing in each case is not competence, resources, or strategy. It is what Oshun carries. And the myth is clear about what it takes to bring that back: a full reckoning.
That reckoning begins close to home, with asking what you have been treating as supplementary in your own life. The relationships you have been meaning to tend, the beauty you have been deferring until the work is done, the parts of yourself that are loving and tender and generative that you have been setting aside as though they can wait. These are not decorative qualities. They are, as the myth insists, the condition under which everything else becomes possible.
And it extends outward into the communities and institutions we inhabit and build, into the question of what we collectively refuse to value until the world stops working, and what it will actually take to bring those forces back into the room. A gesture or a policy is not enough. What is required is a genuine turning toward what has been left out.
Oshun sat with her coral-beaded comb, watching them fail. She received them warmly when they came to her, even before they found the courage to ask. She set her terms, and she held them. And when the child came, and the terms were met, she gave everything.
The sixteen made the oldest mistake in the world. They are not the last to have made it. And Oshun is still waiting.
Source: Rowland Ọlá Abíodún, “Hidden Power: Osun, the Seventeenth Odu,” 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, 2001).