Abstract Drawing on practitioner perspectives and interviews conducted during spirit incorporation, this article reinterprets Ose Otura, a foundational divinatory sign in the Ifa corpus, the Yòrubá knowledge and divination system, to show how knowledge of Osun, the Yòrubá riverine orisa of fresh water, sweetness, fertility, healing, and justice, is generated, checked, and lived in practice. While canonical scholarship emphasizes Osun’s exclusion by male orisa, deities, fieldwork across Yorubaland reveals two understated themes: her deliberate refusal to make ebo (ritual offering) as well as her non-maternity. Read together, these reframe kinship beyond biology: Osun’s “children” include stones that multiply in her rivers, devotional paths that carry distinct aspects of her power, and initiates trained to embody water’s law. This article develops what this article calls “becoming river,” a daily repertoire of cooling, feeding, cleaning, oath-making, and incorporation that regulates heat, circulates care, and sustains relation with the elemental world, offering operational protocols for binding power to care in an age of accelerating climate crisis.
Robin Marie Garcia (Thu,) studied this question.