Aizan in Dahomey, Ayizan in Haiti

Ayizan's roots have been traced by ethnographers back across the Atlantic to a specific West African source rather than left as a general African inheritance. The American anthropologist Melville Herskovits, working in the kingdom of Dahomey in the 1930s, documented a spirit and sacred category called Aizan among the Fon, associated there with markers of consecrated ground, boundaries and the protection of the marketplace and public space, a role closely paralleling the Haitian lwa who bears almost the same name. Herskovits's fieldwork, published in his study of Dahomey, was part of a broader scholarly effort in the early twentieth century to demonstrate specific, traceable continuities between named West African deities and named lwa and orisha of the Americas, against an older assumption that enslaved Africans' religions had been wholly destroyed or replaced. Ayizan's case is one of the more direct correspondences that survived comparison: not merely a shared general character, spirit of the market and of consecrated boundary, but a name carried across the Middle Passage with recognizable continuity.

Later scholars have treated Herskovits's Dahomey-to-Haiti comparisons with more caution than he applied himself, noting that Haitian Vodou drew on many West and Central African sources beyond Dahomey alone, but Ayizan's naming remains one of the clearer individual threads in that larger, harder to untangle inheritance.