Yemaya incense sticks

How to Use It

Santería & Lucumí

• Shrine offering: light a stick before her blue and white altar beside a bowl of water and seashells, and talk to her as you would to your mother.
• Peace in the home: burn it with a blue candle during family trouble and ask her to calm the waters of the house.
• Sea offering: take seven white flowers and seven coins to the shore, light a stick on the sand, and give the gifts to the waves.

Folk Catholicism & Spiritism

• Our Lady of Regla: burn the incense before her image on 7 September or on Saturdays, praying for sailors, travellers and mothers.
• Emotional cleansing: after a sea-salt bath, stand in the smoke and ask her to carry grief and heaviness out with the tide.

A Simple Working

• Fill a blue or clear bowl with water and stir in a pinch of sea salt.
• Drop in seven coins and a few seashells.
• Light a blue candle beside the bowl and one stick of Yemaya incense.
• Rest your hands on either side of the bowl and ask her for protection for your home and family.
• Leave the bowl for seven days, lighting a stick each evening.
• On the last day, pour the water into the sea or a river and keep the coins on her altar.

Pairs Well With

• Blue candle: her colour, for peace and protection.
• Sea salt: for her water bowl and cleansing baths.
• Seashells: to dress her shrine.
• Molasses: a traditional sweet offering.

What You Receive

Yemaya stick incense, a box of 6 hexagon packs with 20 sticks in each (120 sticks).

Origin & Lore

Yemaya (Yemoja, Iemanjá) is the Yoruba Orisha of motherhood and, in the Americas, of the ocean. Her colours are blue and white, her number is seven, and in Cuba she is syncretised with Our Lady of Regla, the dark Virgin of Havana’s harbour, celebrated on 7 September. Devotees give her watermelon, molasses, white flowers and seven coins.

Every New Year’s Eve, crowds in white wade into the surf at Copacabana carrying flowers and small boats of gifts for the mother of the sea. Yemaya is honoured where the water meets the shore.

In Nigeria, Yemoja was first a river goddess of the Egba Yoruba, worshipped along the Ogun river. When her devotees were carried across the Atlantic in the slave trade, she became the mother of the ocean itself, and in Cuba, Brazil and beyond she is now the great Orisha of the sea.