The name is an argument in itself. Chukwu is chi plus ukwu, the great chi, and chi is the word for the personal spirit-portion that every Igbo person is understood to receive and to carry through life. The supreme being is therefore named in the same vocabulary as the individual soul, as its source and its largest instance rather than as something of a different order altogether. The second name, Chineke, is usually parsed as chi na eke, the chi that creates or apportions, and a third, Chukwu Okike, says the same thing more plainly.
What Chukwu does not have is a cult. There is no shrine to Chukwu, no priest of Chukwu, no festival of Chukwu, and no sacrifice offered to him in the way sacrifice is offered to Ala or to Amadioha. Where he appears is in speech. Igbo personal names carry him in quantity: Chukwuemeka, God has done much; Chinedu, God leads; Ngozichukwu, the blessing of God. He appears in the formula that closes a prayer begun at an alusi shrine, in oaths, and in the resigned observation that a matter now rests with him. A visitor could spend a year attending Igbo ritual and never see Chukwu addressed, while hearing his name several hundred times a day.
The tiers below him do the work. The alusi hold domains and places and have shrines, attendants, prohibitions and tempers. The ndichie, the ancestors, remain in the lineage. The chi is personal. Chukwu stands above all of it as the origin and the final guarantor, and the arrangement is often compared to a court in which the ruler is not approached directly by a petitioner who has not first gone through the officers.