Figure 4:

Statue by Susan Wenger and her assistant Adebisi Akanji, of Iya Mopo “the goddess who is both pot and potter as dramatized by her activity of “molding form around preexistent space”. Since this space is understood in both biological and ontological terms, she is, therefore, not only “patroness of all women’s occupations (including a woman’s erotic vocation, conception and birth [symbolized by the children on her back]) and all women’s trades” but is representative of the primal spiritual power of women as incarnated in the conception of the witch, in which capacity the witch’s ability for spiritual motion is represented here by the massive wings that unfurl from her back. “Three pairs of slender outstretched arms [emerge in front of her] one to receive and one to throw out sacred fecundities and one in the fist over fist symbol gesture of the Ogboni the cult of the earth, with which she is associated as representing an aspect of the earth as physical and spiritual creatrix (Brockmann and Hotter, 1994,p.53; Wenger and Chesi, 1983,p.140).