Where is Mami Wata when we need her? We’re in a Brazilian mode today at AOC.

Reading Jezebel’s rundown on the new Starbucks siren logo making her “the most powerful woman in the world”, minutes after writing Snake Charmer Woman Kate Moss | Vatican’s Exorcist Files’ and posting two sensual, gorgeous Vogue Brazil editorials, we couldn’t help thinking of Mami Wata and a few other Snake Charmer women in history.

Dodai is spot on when she writes that the Starbucks siren is desexualized. Historically a woman’s private parts have figured significantly in the mythology and her visual representations.

The progress of human civilization and mankind (not womankind) depended on slaying the beast, so to speak, and the siren lost her metaphorical private parts in public.

She is Mother Water, Mother of Fishes, goddess of oceans, rivers and pools, with sources in West and Central Africa and tributaries throughout the African Americas, from Bahia to Brooklyn. Usually shown as a half-woman, half-fish, she slips with ease between incompatible elements: water and air, tradition and modernity, this life and the next. via AOC

Several of us on the same page today, which could provide for fertile collaboration in the future. Watch this incredible Kate Moss video, produced for Balmain F/W 2010/11 by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin.

After the video, meet up with Mama Wati and other Snake Charmer women. I’m sensing that when looking for a foil to the Mama Grizzlies, I called the Snake Charmers dead on. Anne

Kate Moss for Balmain

Private Note: Dear “internationally acclaimed writer”. I’d really appreciate your not ripping off Mami Wata and Brazilian sensuality, without crediting your ‘inspiration’ source. You’re really in creativity deficit this week, acclaimed or not, so I imagine you’ll take her as your own idea by the weekend. Please consider the ethics involved of creative stalking. Thanks. Anne

More reading: