"Our gift to the traveler is a simple one — we heal those who are in pain."
— The Temple of Stendarr, The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall
A deity or demigod whose specialty is healing. Most gods can heal in a pinch, but they are not pure healers with a healing domain within a Fantasy Pantheon. In real-life mythologies, this god is the one who teaches medicine and is the patron for human healing arts. This trope is Older Than Dirt since it appears in stone age cultures, Ancient Egypt, and Mesopotamian Mythology.
This trope is for deities and not mortal characters with a healing ability like Healing Hands. This type of deity is often The Medic for their Fantasy Pantheon and is a source of Life Energy or White Magic for player characters needing healing. This type of deity tends to be on the good side of Balance Between Good and Evil or Black-and-White Morality, or on the side of life in Life/Death Juxtaposition against death.
Subtrope of Stock Gods.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- In Fushigi Yuugi, the Nyan-Nyan are minor goddesses of healing in the Fantasy Pantheon of the series. They normally take the form of adorable little girls (who all appear to be clones of each other), though they do make an appearance as beautiful adult women towards the end, and one takes the form of a young teenager in the 2nd OVA. They can also be used as temporary containers for disembodied souls with unfinished business.
Comic Books
- Wonder Woman (1987): Apollo's position as an Olympian healer comes up when Zeus' power and mind begin to degrade, but even he can do nothing for a god whose power source has failed so utterly that it is affecting his mind within his own realm.
Literature
- Dark Shores: Hegeria, worshipped as the goddess of the body, who gives her marked the ability to heal wounds and diseases. This comes at a price, since trying to heal someone whose affliction or wound is really serious can age or even kill the healer.
- In Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?, there are a number of gods who specialize in making healing potions. One of Hestia's close friends in Orario, Miach, is a Nice Guy who enjoys handing out potions to newbies in need of them, even though it constantly puts his already impoverished family in the red. His rival, Dian Cecht, is comparatively wealthy due to his high-quality potions but is a known Jerkass who constantly overcharges for his services.
- The Raven Tower: Oissen is the Physical God of healing and the inventor of Miracle Food, which give him a sizeable following in Ard Vusktia. It's very much a case of Good Powers, Bad People since he hones his abilities by observing thousands of slaves as they die of preventable conditions.
- Guardians of the Flame: Doria becomes her character, who's a cleric of the Healing Hand. The entire order is dedicated to healing people in their deity's service.
- Fengshen Yanyi: When Jiang Ziya names the new 365 gods, the God of Smallpox, Yu Hualong, is told that to compensate his role, his wife Lady Jin will become a healing Goddess of Hospital Wards, tasked with preserving life.
- The Hero is Overpowered but Overly Cautious: Ristarte is the Goddess of Healing, but because she is relatively young for a goddess, unless her full power is released with Order, her healing is about as strong as a medicinal herb. This causes her Hero Seiya to treat her like a Loser Deity at times.
Mythology & Religion
- Aztec Mythology:
- Celtic Mythology
- Airmid was Mother of Herbal Healers.
- Brighid was a popular, major goddess presiding over healing, poetry, and smithwork.
- Dian Cecht was god of Medicine and father of Airmid.
- The Bible: Jesus, being the Son of God and given authority to heal the sick, goes on to heal the sick, notably blind people and lepers, exorcise demons, and resurrect the dead, even on Sabbath days, to which Jewish authorities find it a violation on their laws. Jesus is of course famous for healing people in the Gospels. Healings are probably the most frequent miracle that he's shown to perform.
- Chinese Mythology:
- Most of The Eight Immortals are associated with healing. They carry items, such as a lotus flower, gourd, or wine, which create medicine.
- In Shenism (Chinese folk religion), Shennong was the venerated Father of Medicine, the mythical Yan Emperor who spread knowledge of herbs and medicine. Shennong supposedly died from too much herbal experimentation on his own body.
- Wong Tai Sin or Huang Daxian is a god with the power of healing, also known as "Great Immortal Wong (Huang)".
- Classical Mythology — Ancient Greece:
- Apollo had medicine as one of his domains, and was the father of the god of medicine Asclepius.
- Asclepius was the official Greek god of medicine.
- Epione was Asclepius's wife. Her name meant "soothing", and her role seemed to be a nursemaid.
- Hygieia was a goddess of health, cleanliness, and sanitation and daughter of Asclepius. Her name later became "hygiene".
- "Panacea" became a word meaning cure-all. But originally Panacea was the Greek goddess of universal remedies and the daughter of Asclepius.
- Canaanite Mythology: Shadrafa was a benevolent deity whose name translates to "Spirit of Healing". He was the patron deity of the ancient city Leptis Magna, near modern-day Tripoli in the country of Libya. He was worshiped in other ancient Semitic cultures such as Palmyra. He is depicted as young and beautiful (like Adonis) with helpful serpents, scorpions, and lions.
- Classical Mythology — Ancient Rome
- Bona Dea was a Roman goddess who cured diseases related to childbirth and infertility.
- Menrva was an Etruscan goddess of war, art, wisdom, and medicine. She later lost the medicine domain and became the Roman war goddess Minerva.
- Egyptian Mythology:
- The goddess Isis was considered a great healer - she cured Osiris.
- Heqet was a goddess of health and wellness. She was worshiped by medical practitioners.
- Serket was the goddess of fertility, nature, animals, magic, and medicine. One of her specialties was healing venomous stings and bites, which might be why she is depicted wearing a scorpion on her head.
- Inuit Mythology: Pinga was the goddess of medicine, fertility, and hunting, as well as a Psychopomp.
- Hindu Mythology: Dhanvantari was physician of the gods and god of Ayurvedic medicine.
- Japanese Mythology:
- Okuninushi was the god of nation-building, farming, business, and medicine.
- Yakushi Nyorai was a Buddha known for healing and medicine.
- Mesopotamian Mythology:
- Eshmun was a god of healing during the Iron Age in Phoenicia. Eshmun was worshipped in Carthage, Tyre, Beirut, Cyprus, Sardinia, and Sidon.
- Kamrusepa is a Hittite goddess of healing, medicine, and magic.
- Nintinugga/Gula/Bau was the Babylonian goddess of healing, and consort of Ninurta.
- Ninurta was god of the South Wind and healing.
- Norse Mythology: Eir was the goddess of medical skills.
- Voudoun:
- The Santerian Orisha named Aja was a powerful goddess of healing. (Orisha is a human recognized as a god or goddess).
- The Santerian Orisha named Babalu Aye has the specialty of curing infectious diseases.
- Bhaisajyaguru is the medicine Buddha whose mantra is thought to be curative.
Tabletop Games
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- Dragonlance: This book and games series has a gentle goddess of healing and compassion named Mishakal.
- Forgotten Realms:
- Ilmater is a good god who takes on others' suffering, and healing others is a major duty for his worshipers.
- Lathander is the god of birth, renewal, healing, and the sunrise/dawn. He's basically Pelor from the Greyhawk setting with a different name and a bit less of a solar focus.
- Luthic is the only orc deity concerned with healing, and the most powerful orc goddess.
- Naralis Analor is an elven god known as the Watcher of Souls or the Healer.
- Healing is a domain for dwarven goddesses Sharindlar and Berronar Truesilver.
- Greyhawk: Pelor was the popular sun god of light, strength, and healing.
- Games Workshop games:
- Warhammer: Shallya, the pacifistic White Dove of Mercy, is the Human goddess of healing who is loved by all good people. While she and her followers are mostly relegated to the lore when they do have rules (such as in the Gaiden Game Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay), Shallya grants a broad range of healing spells to her cultists, along with one potent offensive spell that only affects followers of Nurgle, the Chaos God of Disease.
- Warhammer 40,000: Isha, the mother goddess of the Aeldari, is also the goddess of healing and rejuvenation. After the Fall of the Aeldari, Isha was captured by Nurgle, the Chaos God of Plagues, who holds her prisoner within his mansion, testing his newest infections on her to see how long it takes her to heal herself. Isha continues to help her children, however, sending them the cures for Nurgle's diseases in their dreams whenever the Plague Father is distracted.
- The GURPS "Dungeon Fantasy" sub-line features classic dungeon fantasy-style clerics and holy warriors, and allows for the possibility of them worshiping a range of deities. As in other games of dungeon-delving adventure, virtually all clerics — at least, all "good" clerics — tend to have healing as a primary function, but some focus on it especially hard. GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 7: Clerics offers different spell lists and special powers for different types of deity served, and "Gods of Healing" is an option there. The book even covers the possibility of "holy warriors of healing", while acknowledging that this seems a little paradoxical and may require some special explanation.
- Pathfinder:
- RuneQuest: In Glorantha, Chalana Arroy is an Actual Pacifist goddess of healing. Even the lay members of her cult must pledge to heal and never harm.
Video Games
- In the City-Building Series:
- Pharaoh: When a city worships Bast as Patron God and adds the right upgrades to her Temple Complex, her priestesses can remove plagued citizens, preventing them from spreading the infection further (they don't replace physicians though). On the flip side, anger Bast and she'll send a plague.
- Zeus: Master of Olympus: As a Patron God, Apollo helps prevent plague in your city. However, if he's hostile, he'll send a plague and curse your infirmaries.
- Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom: As the legendary founder of Chinese herbal medicine, when the Divine Farmer Shen Nong walks the streets of your city, he provides herbalist services to all households he passes and halves the cost of new herbalist buildings.
- In Dragon Age's elven pantheon, Sylaise, the Hearthkeeper, governs all forms of magical and mundane healing, and is said to have taught the art to the elves in the first place.
- The Elder Scrolls:
- While all of the Aedra do qualify to some degree, Stendarr, the God of Justice, and Kynareth, Goddess of the Heavens, are usually the deities that are most heavily associated with healing. Tellingly, this is likely due to their spheres of influence as gods of Compassion and Mercy (Stendarr, on top of being a God of Justice), and a Nature Goddess (Kynareth).
- Mara, goddess of love, also qualifies in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, as her amulets make Restoration spells easier to cast.
- EverQuest features Rodcet Nife as the God of Health and Healing. He and his followers are fundamentally opposed to Bertoxxulous, the evil God of Disease, and his disease-spreading worshippers. EverQuest II reveals that he took up the vacant domain after the previous Goddess of Health, Anashti'Sul, was banished to the Void because her idea of "curing" death was to create the existence of The Undead. The domain had been abandoned, and by the time Anashti was able to escape the void back to Norrath, Rodcet had been the Prime Healer for a few millennia. She has since become the evil Goddess of Undeath instead.
- In Fate/Grand Order, Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine, can be summoned as a Servant in his previously mortal form. As such, he cannot bring people back from the dead as in the myth but is still capable of prodigious feats of healing.
- Honkai: Star Rail has Yaoshi, the Aeon of Abundance who's known by the title of "Sanctus Medicus" or "Merciful Medicus". Aside from healing they're also fond of granting immortality and longevity, though said longevity tends to come with some adverse side effects such as mutating into monsters after a certain period of time as well as being unable to fix inborn disabilities such as blindness despite existing tech that should make such problems easily correctable. This has led to the Xianzhou Alliance (whom they granted said form of immortality) to dedicate themselves to hunting down the followers of Yaoshi, who they now refer to as the "Plagues Author".
- King of Dragon Pass: Chalana Arroy is the Orlanthi goddess of healing and the one you rely on for healing all forms of injury and illness. Her followers are forbidden from causing harm to another. According to Orlanthi myth, she was a Badass Pacifist who subdued several angry gods through healing alone.
- Subverted in the interactive romance novel Moonrise. While other characters laud Ishara as a goddess with vast powers, she's actually just a wayward healer from another world. In her original world, her powers are perfectly ordinary.
- Six Ages has Erissa, a pacifistic healer goddess with marked similarities to King of Dragon Pass's Chalana Arroy. And Chalana herself cameos: invoke her name, and her worshippers must let a healer pass them to reach her patient, even if they were in the process of killing said patient a minute ago.
- Namu Amida Butsu! -UTENA-: Yakushi Nyorai, like in actual Buddhist mythology. He's the go-to doctor for the temple; if any other Buddha sustains any sort of injury or bodily harm, expect his name to pop up.
