Before it named an orisha, aganju was, and remains, an ordinary Yoruba common noun, referring to wild, uninhabited bush country, open plain or unclaimed wilderness lying beyond settled farmland and town, the kind of untamed terrain a traveler had to cross rather than a place anyone lived. Linguists and scholars of Yoruba religion who have examined the orisha's name read it as a case, common across West African religious vocabulary, in which a plain descriptive term for a category of landscape was elevated into the proper name of the divine power understood to inhabit or personify that landscape, so Aganju the orisha is, in a real sense, the wilderness itself addressed and honored as a person rather than a distinct deity given an arbitrary name unconnected to what he governs. This pattern recurs elsewhere in Yoruba religious naming, where several orisha carry names transparently built from ordinary words for the natural feature, force or craft they preside over rather than opaque proper names of the kind more common among, for instance, the Greek Olympians.
Recognizing the everyday root of Aganju's name sharpens rather than diminishes his character as described elsewhere: a god of volcanoes, desert and untamed rivers whose very name is the Yoruba word for the kind of country where none of those tamer categories, farmland, town, garden, apply, the wild remainder of the landscape that any traveler, ancient or modern, still has to find the strength to cross.