Aspects
She is seen in aspects as the warrior-spirit of the wind, lightning, fertility, fire, and magic. She creates hurricanes and tornadoes, and guards the underworld. She is the spirit of tornadoes (which are said to be her whirling skirts as she dances), lightning (the power of which she acquired from her husband, Shango), earthquakes, and any kind of destruction. Beyond destruction, Oya is the spirit of change, transition, and the chaos that often brings it about. Her association with the marketplace, and more specifically with the gates of cemeteries (as opposed to the entire underworld), reveals her in her aspect as facilitator of transition. Oyá, when danced, often has a horse tail. Her clothes have all the colors but black. She has a face expression of really big and open eyes, and she breathes and blows up her chins, and often screams.
Oya's close association with the passage from life into death also means she is one of the few Orishas which are worshiped alongside the Egun ancestors, whose cult is most often distinct from that of the Orishas. In the stories of the faith, she can transform herself into a water buffalo. One of her preferred offerings is the eggplant.
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Famous quotes containing the word aspects:
“The happiest two-job marriages I saw during my research were ones in which men and women shared the housework and parenting. What couples called good communication often meant that they were good at saying thanks to one another for small aspects of taking care of the family. Making it to the school play, helping a child read, cooking dinner in good spirit, remembering the grocery list,... these were silver and gold of the marital exchange.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)
“The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out.... Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“The North American system only wants to consider the positive aspects of reality. Men and women are subjected from childhood to an inexorable process of adaptation; certain principles, contained in brief formulas are endlessly repeated by the press, the radio, the churches, and the schools, and by those kindly, sinister beings, the North American mothers and wives. A person imprisoned by these schemes is like a plant in a flowerpot too small for it: he cannot grow or mature.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)