Among the amadlozi, the ancestral dead who remain members of the lineage, lies the living heart of Zulu religious practice, and right relationship with them is maintained through recognised, publicly known means. The ancestors make themselves felt through dreams, through certain illnesses understood as a call, and, in a widely reported belief, through a particular harmless house-snake taken as an ancestor's visit.
Relations with them are kept through the honouring of the homestead, through the ritual slaughter of cattle and the sharing of meat and beer with the wider family, and through the diviner, the isangoma, who is called to the office by the ancestors and speaks on their behalf, as distinct from the inyanga, the herbalist and healer. It is this ongoing veneration of the family dead, rather than the worship of a remote creator, that forms the continuing centre of Zulu tradition today.