Malagasy Traditional Religion holds one creator at a distance and spends nearly all its practical attention elsewhere. Zanahary made the world and is invoked at the edges of prayer and oath, but has no dedicated priesthood, no built temple and no regular cult of his own; where Christian teaching has spread, Zanahary is commonly merged with, or simply replaced by, Andriamanitra, the term Malagasy Bible translation settled on for God. Whether the two names ever named a single figure, or whether nearly two centuries of mission teaching pressed a Christian God onto an older and more remote creator, is argued rather than settled, and the atlas records the merger as a fact of present usage without resolving the history behind it.
The razana, the ancestors, are where the religion actually lives. A dead person who received proper burial rites remains a member of the family rather than departing it, consulted, thanked, and blamed in roughly the way a difficult living relative would be. The family tomb, built to last and often more substantial than the house of the living, is the point of contact: it holds the ancestors together, anchors the family's claim to its land, and is the site to which the living return for blessing, permission and reburial. Fady, the taboos a family, a clan or a place inherits from its razana or its founding ancestor, forbid particular foods, actions or unions, and they are held with the seriousness of religious law even though no single text records them; they differ from family to family, and a fady broken is understood to bring real consequence on the person who broke it.