Snake in the Grass

Question: Why is Damballah, of the Loa, not listed in the Orisha?

Oh, this one's easy! Because Damballa isn't an orisha.

While it's easy to make generalizations about the loa of the Afro-American religions and we often talk a lot about how the loa are just the orisha wearing different clothes, in fact they do have among their ranks gods who are not and never were orisha. The African slave trade didn't just target the Yoruba but rather brought peoples from many different African cultures and religions to the western world, where they syncretized their own beliefs with those of the native Americans and their European masters until they ended up with the vibrant modern diaspora religions. And while the orisha may be the dominant force among the loa, with most of them clearly showing roots stretching back to Yorubaland, they're not the only African imports to be preserved and venerated by their displaced people.

Damballa is one of these non-orisha gods. He's certainly African in origin, and also unquestionably important in Haitian vodun, but he hails not from the Yoruba but from their nearby neighbors the Fon, an African people centered in Dahomey (modern-day coastal Nigeria and Togo, rubbing elbows with the Yoruba from day one). There he was (and still is) worshiped as Da, the rainbow serpent, father of humanity and lord of pythons; in the Americas, he has been split from his originally dual-natured form into a married pair, Damballa and Ayeda Wedo, who together oversee snakes and rainbows alike.

While the Fon and the Yoruba are certainly close neighbors who have shared a lot of culture and ideas over the years, it wouldn't be accurate to say that they're the same people any more than it would be accurate to say that the Chinese and Tibetans are. While they do have a few crossover gods - the most obvious is the trickster god, Eshu to the Yoruba and Legba to the Fon, who is almost identical between the two - they also have plenty of differences. The Yoruba have their own rainbow serpent orisha, Oshumare, and while he shares superficial characteristics with Da, his cult worship is different (and less prominent than Da's, traditionally) and his divine character unique.

So Damballa isn't among the ranks of the Orisha because, well, he isn't. He would be high on the list if you put together a Fon pantheon, however, and is a candidate for that someday-my-dreams-will-come project where we stat up gods who are important but don't have full pantheon writeups yet.