A distinctive feature of Mende religious organisation, noted by every serious ethnographer of the society from Kenneth Little onward, is the separation between secular political office and ritual authority. The paramount and section chiefs hold recognised political power, land allocation and judicial standing, but the deeper moral and ritual authority in Mende communities belongs to Poro, the men's initiation society, and its counterpart for women, Sande. A man's standing in public affairs has traditionally depended in real part on his rank within Poro, so the society functions as much as an institution of governance and law as one of religious initiation, and its closed teachings are protected by real social sanction rather than mere custom.
Sande performs an equivalent role for women, presiding over female initiation, instruction in adult women's responsibilities, and matters of female fertility and reproductive life that fall outside the men's society's reach entirely. Both societies are living, closed institutions still functioning across Mende communities today, and both are recorded on their own secret society pages in this atlas, with only their public shape, membership and social function described, not their restricted interior content. What Mende Traditional Religion contributes to that record is the context the two societies operate inside: a cosmology in which the creator is distant and the societies, not a separate priesthood, carry out the practical work of moral formation, fertility and initiation in his place.