Lovely Lady of the Waves

Question: In Brazil, Iemanjá is perharps the most widely worshiped Orisha. Do you guys consider she's Legend 11 or 10, or is it more like in the Core where she's just an aspect of the water Titan Mami Wata?

Oh, we would definitely say she's much too important to be only Legend 10 or 11. Yemaja (or Iemanja, or Yemaya, or about ten other variations on her name) is a pivotally important figure in Orisha mythology and religions like Candomble that descended from it, and the mother of half the pantheon to boot.

We're most inclined to treat Yemanja as a Titan. She's definitely of the older generations of the Orisha, and while that doesn't automatically mean she has to be a Titan (after all, Obatala isn't!), it does position her as a primordial mother figure to many of the other gods, a role that Titans often fill. In addition, in Yoruba mythology she has a very troubled relationship with the rest of the Orisha thanks to her assault and rape by her son Orungan, after which she gave birth to most of the other major Orisha (including Ogun, Shango, Oshun and Oya) in the midst of her trauma (or, depending on the interpretation of the myth, as a result of committing suicide to escape Orungan). Being assaulted by her children and then giving birth to the rest of them as a direct result of that assault is not likely to make her be very invested in wanting to be a part of the pantheon, and she has more than enough reason to act toward them in enmity, or at least indifference to their problems.

There's a lot of interesting historical discussion going on about exactly what happened with Yemanja and her cult in the African diaspora. She was a fairly important, but not all-important, goddess in pre-slavery Yoruba society; she did have her shrines and worshipers, but as the older mother-goddess she was more of a figure of story than a currently active power, and the prevalence of other local river-goddesses made her less necessary as a major water functionary. When large numbers of Yoruba people were captured and taken as slaves across the Atlantic Ocean, Yemanja, as the mother goddess of water, was possibly called upon to intercede for them or help take care of them during the journey, and it's possible that she became much more important for those who had to cross the ocean and thrive in a new land under terrible conditions than she had been for those in the motherland for whom the status quo had not changed so drastically. Because there was also an ocean god in play - Olokun, who later probably became Agwe - it's also likely that Yemanja and Olokun shared some legendary aspects during the crossing and affected one anothers' cults, leading to Yemanja rising in supremacy while Olokun diminished in the New World. Yemanja therefore has an importance in South America that she perhaps didn't have in Africa, which results in more worship there than she might have had in traditional Yorube religion.

However, we've never liked calling her just a part of Mami Wata. While Mami Wata figures are widespread across various West African cultures and their diaspora peoples, they often represent water goddesses that have been heavily altered by syncretization or lost to historical omission of previous religions, and that doesn't apply much to the Orisha, who not only have and remember Yemanja quite well but also other major water deities like Oshun, Oya, Oba or Erinle (indeed, Mami Wata is a figure borrowed from other coastal African peoples, not a native Yoruba figure). Mami Wata is a comparatively younger creature as well as a more narrow interpretation of what a water goddess might do and represent (i.e., often she is a siren-like bombshell but lacks Yemanja's connotations of motherhood or sustenance of life), and with Yemanja having such a central and important place in Yoruba mythology, it doesn't make much sense to us to remove her and replace her with an only somewhat-related figure who isn't really from the same culture in the first place.

So we do consider Yemanja to probably be a Titan, but she doesn't necessarily have all that much to do with the original books' Mami Wata. If anything, Mami Wata would be an aspect of Yemanja and not the other way around.