"Mami Wata's most popular image is as half woman, half aquatic creature, but we quickly discovered that she represents a whole conglomerate of water deities that embody both maleness and femaleness.
Dyani and Ali are currently raising funds for MAMI, an art exhibition and lecture series at the Knockdown Center inspired by Mami Wata, a pantheon of water deities that originates from West and Central African matriarchal spiritual systems.
Water evokes serenity, harmony and peaceful existence, the very essence of life itself, commemorated in the past by magnificent shrines and elaborate rituals in honor of the deities that ensure the continuity of water -- and life.
One of the enshrined deities here is Suijin, the Kami of Water.
At dawn next day, we watched the sun rise over the home of a pre-Islamic deity: Takht-e-Soleiman, a volcanic crater where Anahita, goddess of water, used to preside over the coronation of Persian kings.
They house many life-sized, painted figures (sculpted in mud to appease the Alusi (deity) and Ala, the earth goddess, with other deities of thunder and water).
Elaborate cultic practices surround those sources of water that have been the scenes of epiphanies (manifestations of deities or sacred beings) or in which divinities are believed to dwell.
12 Dewi Danu is today the deity of the Crater Lake, the goddess who controls the water that flows subterraneously from the lake and fertilizes large parts of Bali (see Lansing 1991, p.73 77).
Out in the countryside the old Mesopotamian religion survived until cAD1000, among pagan tribes in the south of the plain who worshipped the deities of the primal waters, the abode of the old Sumerian god Enki.
Yet it is with relief that he realises he had drunk not from the waters of Mnemosyne, goddess of memory but of Lethe, deity of forgetfulness, thus condemned to "return to earth, to learn all over again".
Neptune, Latin Neptunus, in Roman religion, originally the god of fresh water; by 399 bce he was identified with the Greek Poseidon and thus became a deity of the sea.
