Daily Deity #234 Aja

Despite this Orisha not being one of the most prominent in her pantheon she certainly has a lot to offer the Earth.

For those that don't know, an Orisha is the term used for the gods of the Yoruba pantheon, like how the Greek gods are called Olympians and some of the Norse gods are Aesir. The Yoruba gods originate from West Africa, most notably Nigeria and Benin, but are well known to have spread throughout the world due to the slave trade. As happened with any people who moved in whatever way around the world, they took their culture and customs with them. Today, many Orishas can be found in the Caribbean with only small alterations, if any, to their original characters from Nigeria. 

In the case of Aja it doesn't seem that she managed to make it to the Caribbean. As unfortunate as this is, it does make sense. She wasn't one of the central or highest ranking gods in her pantheon, and she wouldn't be someone to pray to get assistance. However, that doesn't mean that she isn't important to us humans. But before we get to that, we need to discuss her other role. 

Aja is a nature-based goddess. She is mainly considered a goddess of the forest, but she also is a goddess of animals. While it may seem common or assumed that most deities of the Earth or of the forest or other physical form of nature would be attached to animals, this is not always the case. It is far more common to find hunter gods fall under the category of nature gods. Even though most hunter gods usually also deal with the protection for the animals they hunt, there is something inherently different in a goddess who only protects animals without hunting them.

With her larger forest aspect is where Aja applies more to her interactions with humans. One of the main roles of any nature deity or spirit is to keep the health of the environment in which they live. Aja just seems to take this one step further. Along with acting as a forest and animal goddess, Aja is also a healer goddess. 

Being a healer/medicinal god is not that rare of a role to have, and it's an extremely important role in any pantheon. Yet, with Aja we have a new and more reasonable approach to healing. Most gods of healing can heal just through an incantation or a wave of their hands. Not that this makes them any less important, but it sort of distances themselves away from humans. Aja did the exact opposite. Instead of just snapping her fingers and getting rid of someone's sniffles, she went into the forests that she knew so well. 

In her forests she would find plants with medicinal properties and mix the herbs and roots and other plant parts together to form the cure that was needed. Aja wasn't too tight-lipped with her knowledge either and was well-known for sharing the information she gained with humans. However, that doesn't mean that she would just walk into a town, stand in the center, and start rattling off ingredients to prevent headaches. What she did do was wait for someone to come and find her. 

This person was usually a shaman in training, or someone of the like. There are varying lengths of time that are said in how long the person needed to be out in the forest before Aja approached them with her knowledge, but it was a significant portion of time. During this time the person proved themselves to be worthy of being passed on how to use the properties of plants to heal others.

For this reason alone Aja is unlike so many other Earth deities. In most cases, earth gods rarely have any direct interactions with humans. Usually the only interactions that occur between nature gods and humans is either to scare humans out of the woods or to kill them. But Aja isn't like that. Instead of trying to keep people out of the forests and away from nature, she extended her realm to us in order to show the importance of what was in the natural world. This is perhaps one of the most essential messages any Earth goddess has ever presented to humanity. It provides an inherent respect for the Earth and it is possibly the best way to generate a need to protect and conserve the natural world.