The god of smallpox? As someone raised on a monotheistic religion, reading this story certainly brought forward some ideas that I’m not used to. I wonder why there might be a god of smallpox in this culture.

This wild story recounts the origin of a town and its religion, using some quite graphic imagery to portray it. I see a possible theme of fertility, with Yemaja as the mother of all things in this town.

What I find interesting is that when I tried to find the origin of the story online, I found multiple spellings of the story and even different recounts of it in different languages. It’s cool that the story was brought over to the New World from Africa, and survived many iterations. This again emphasizes the difference between traditional Western stories and ones that have been passed down orally, instead of on paper. It’s also cool that there’s some variation and individuality to each storyteller’s version. I would like to hear different versions of the story, I’m curious how this mother nature mermaid character is depicted in different cultures between Africa and Latin America.

I wonder if the god of smallpox has anything to do with the transmission of smallpox between enslaved people in cramped and unsanitary conditions.