At the head of Kongo religion stands Nzambi a Mpungu, a single creator who made everything and is the source of all power, yet who is not the object of a cult. There are no temples and no sacrifices directed to him; he is held to be too great and too distant to be approached over an illness, a debt or a harvest. Those matters belong to the beings who remain close to the living: the ancestors and the spirits of the land and water.
The Kongo cosmos is a divided one. A boundary called Kalunga, imagined as a body of water, separates the visible world of the living, nza yayi, from the invisible land of the dead, nsi a bafwa, that lies beneath it. The two worlds are mirror images, and the dead are not gone but relocated, living an inverted day on the far side of the water. Death is a crossing rather than an ending, and a well-remembered person may return to the lineage.
The bakulu, the ancestors, are the daily partners of the living. They are fed at graves and shrines, addressed by name, and asked for children, rain, health and success; in return they expect to be remembered and to have their moral order kept. Alongside them are the bisimbi (singular simbi), spirits of springs, pools, rocks and gullies, powers of the land itself, older than any family, that must be respected by those who live near them.
Power in this world is real, transferable and morally neutral until it is used. The same force that heals can harm, and the tradition names the harmful, self-serving use of spiritual power kindoki. The specialists who detect and counter it, and the initiatory means by which power is bound into objects, belong to a body of knowledge that is held closely and learned under instruction; it is described here only as existing.