Ngewo, the Distant Sky, and the Spirits Who Act for Him

Ngewo created the universe and everything in it, and then, in the way Mende tradition tells it, withdrew from active involvement in the world he had made. He is still understood to hold final authority: nothing occurs, good or bad, entirely outside his permission, and his name is invoked in oaths and in moments of last appeal, but he keeps no shrine, receives no regular sacrifice, and is not approached as a matter of routine practice. This is a common shape among West African sky creators, and Mende religion shares it with several neighbouring traditions.

The practical work of Mende religion runs instead through ancestral spirits and a wide range of nature spirits associated with particular rivers, forests and rocks, consulted and propitiated through diviners who diagnose the cause of illness or misfortune and prescribe the sacrifice or observance that will resolve it. Herbalists and diviners hold real social authority on this basis, since their diagnoses of spiritual cause carry weight in ordinary disputes and decisions as well as in matters of health. Membership in Poro and Sande layers a further, more structured religious authority on top of this everyday spirit world, described on those societies' own pages rather than here, since both are closed institutions whose interior teaching the atlas does not reconstruct.