Vietnamese popular religion is organised as a court, and the court has a distinctly Vietnamese arrangement at its centre.
The Jade Emperor presides at the top, inherited with the wider East Asian bureaucratic model, along with the whole apparatus of ranked celestial offices, registers and petitions. Below that, the tradition of Dao Mau organises much of the working religion around Mother Goddesses and four palaces, heaven, forest and mountain, water, and earth, each with its own colour, its own retinue of mandarins, dames, princes and damsels, and its own liturgical repertoire.
Rank in this system is administrative. Spirits hold office, are addressed with titles, and can be promoted, and for long stretches of Vietnamese history the imperial state issued formal recognitions to village tutelary deities, which regulated who could be worshipped where.
The route in is national as much as ancestral. Tran Hung Dao, the general who defeated the Mongol invasions, is venerated as a deity with his own network of temples. The Hung kings, held to be the founders of the nation, receive a state commemoration. Heroes of the country become gods of the country, and the process has not stopped.
Alongside this run the ancestors of every household, who are the most constant object of observance in Vietnamese life and who are not a separate department from the rest.