Oya — Iyansan, mother of nine — governs wind, storm, lightning's herald, the Niger river, the marketplace and the gate of the cemetery. Her position at the boundary between the living and the dead is functional: she is the orisha with authority over egungun, and in some traditions the masquerade cannot come out without her. This combination of the market and the graveyard is not arbitrary in Yoruba thought, since the market is itself understood as a place where the two worlds mix. She is associated with sudden, total change — the wind that strips a roof, the transformation that arrives without warning — and her devotees are frequently people whose lives have been reorganised abruptly. Her colours are nine, her number is nine, and her emblems are the horsetail whisk and the buffalo horn. In Brazil she is Iansã, and among the most prominent orixás in Candomblé.