Ala is where Igbo religion keeps its ethics. Chukwu underwrites the moral order in the abstract; Ala enforces it, and she enforces it as the owner of the ground everyone stands on. The category of nso ala, abomination against the earth, is the closest thing Odinani has to a criminal code, and what belongs in it is specific rather than general: homicide within the community, theft of yams, incest, and certain births and deaths that fall outside the accepted order have all been recorded as nso ala in one community or another. The list varies between village groups, which is itself characteristic of a religion that had no central authority to standardise anything.
The distinctive feature is not the list but the mechanics. An offence against Ala pollutes the land. It is not a debt the offender owes and can settle privately; it is a stain on ground that a whole lineage farms and is buried in, and it is understood to bring consequences on people who did nothing. The remedy is therefore public: the earth priest, the eze ala or okpara depending on the community, performs a cleansing with prescribed sacrifices, and the community watches it done. Serious cases could carry exile.
Ala's other face is generative. She gives the yam harvest and she gives children, and the two are spoken of together. The new yam festival is hers before it is anyone's. The dead go into her, which makes her the point at which the ancestors and the living meet, since the ndichie lie in the ground she owns. A goddess who is at once the source of food, the mother of children, the receiver of the dead and the judge of conduct is not a specialist deity; she is closer to the whole moral world in one figure.