Name Meaning:

Hidden One, or Pitching One depending on translation

Color:

Pale lavender

Animal:

Shellfish, especially oysters

Specialty:

Duva is the guardian of small ocean islands, and also of obscuring mist and fog over the ocean. She hoards treasures from shipwrecks and buries them on various hidden islands.

Her Gifts:

Saving shipwrecked sailors and guiding them to islands, although she is capricious as to whether she may feel like helping on any given day. She can occasionally be propitiated by treasure-hunters to guide them to undersea wrecks or island caches. She both brings the obscuring mists and clears them away.

Offerings:

Pearls. She loves pearls. Even glass ones will do. Not plastic, though. Lavender glass sea floats.

Altar items:

Pearls, crustacean shells, misty bits of sheer fabric.

Invocation

image by J Roesch

Hail, Lady of the Hidden Isles,
Veiled one whose mists gather like silk
In the air over the grey satin waters.
Hail, Lady who knows the chains of islands
Like pearls strung along the breast
Of the green ocean’s folds,
Who guides the sinking sailors to safety
Or, sometimes, to solitude and longing.
Hail, Hidden One whose face we cannot see
Beneath the veil of your spreading hair,
Beneath the veil of your drifting mystery.
Teach us to honor what is hidden
And to wait for it to reveal itself
Only in its own good time.

Ritual: Parting the Veil

When some fact is hidden and will not come to light, and people are suffering for it, you can propitiate Duva to bring it forth. Like all the sisters, she is capricious, but you have a better chance than you would by doing nothing. Take a piece of silk in some cool, pale color – blue, green, lavender, violet – and wrap in it three pearls. Cut seven slashes in the silk and wrap the pearls in some remaining fold. Tie it up outside in a strong wind and sing and dance around it – the singing and dancing is for her. Give her food and drink, give her gifts, throw them into the ocean or into seawater. When the pearls fall out of the silk, the hidden thing will come to light.