In Yorubaland Yemoja is a river goddess. She belongs specifically to the Ogun River, which runs through Abeokuta, and her name is generally read as Yeye omo eja, mother whose children are fish. The Egba people carried her cult with them when they settled at Abeokuta in the nineteenth century. Her concerns there are those of a river: water for the town, the fertility of women, safe childbirth, the protection of small children.
Across the Atlantic she became the sea. In Cuba, Yemaya is the ocean; in Brazil, Yemanja is the ocean; and the shift is one of the clearest pieces of religious evidence for what the middle passage did to the people who survived it. A tradition centred on a particular named river, one you could walk to, was carried by people who would never see that river again to places where the defining body of water was the one they had been carried across. The goddess of the water became the goddess of that water.
What grew from it is now enormous. On the night of 31 December on Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro, and at Rio Vermelho in Salvador at the beginning of February, crowds dressed in white push small boats loaded with flowers, perfume, combs and mirrors out through the surf. If a boat comes back the offering was refused. Those present include Candomble initiates, Umbanda practitioners, Catholics and people with no religious commitment at all, and the festival is simultaneously a rite, a civic occasion and a tourist event.
In Cuba she is masked behind Our Lady of Regla, the black Virgin of the harbour across the bay from Havana; in Brazil behind Our Lady of the Navigators. Both are patrons of sailors, which fits the ocean rather than the river, so even the Catholic layer records the change.