Among the specific claims made about Oya's authority is an unusual one concerning the egungun, the masked ancestral spirits paraded through Yoruba towns in elaborate ceremonies from which women are traditionally barred, on pain of serious taboo, from looking upon or touching the masquerade. Oya is the standing exception.
Tradition holds that she alone among women has seen what lies beneath the egungun costume and lived, some versions saying she once lifted the cloth of a masquerader in her own household out of curiosity or grief and found her own dead husband beneath it, and rather than punishing this transgression the ancestors granted her lasting authority over the masquerade cult itself, so that egungun ceremonies are placed under her patronage even though their day to day exclusion of women continues, her name being invoked as the sanctioned exception rather than a challenge to the rule.
Historically the market women of Yoruba towns, a powerful and organized economic class in Oyo and neighbouring polities, also claimed Oya as their particular patroness, a pairing of the goddess of sudden upheaval with women who controlled the volatile business of trade. The combination, ancestral masquerade and marketplace commerce, both governed by one female orisha in domains otherwise dominated by men, marks Oya as a figure whose power was specifically defined by crossing boundaries other members of her society could not.