Akan religion rests on a clear hierarchy. Above all stands Nyame, also honored as Onyankopon, the supreme being who made the world and needs no shrine, because, as the proverb behind the Gye Nyame symbol says, no one living saw its beginning and no one will see its end, except God. Beneath Nyame work the abosom, deities of rivers, lakes and forests who take up residence in shrines and speak through their priests, the akomfo, trained mediums who dance the deity in possession and deliver its counsel. Nearer still are the asamanfo, the ancestors, who watch their lineages, receive libation at every gathering and are seated, in a real sense, in the blackened stools kept in the stool rooms of chiefly houses.
Kwame Gyekye's study of the Akan conceptual scheme shows how much of this theology lives inside the Twi language: a person is composed of okra, the divine spark of life sent from Nyame with its destiny, sunsum, the personality-spirit, and mogya, the mother's blood that fixes clan membership in the matrilineal line. Philosophy, religion and kinship are one fabric.
The tradition's storyteller is Ananse the spider, whose cycle of tales, including how he obtained the sky god's stories from Nyame himself, carries Akan wit and moral teaching; carried across the Atlantic, Anansi became a folk hero of Jamaica and the wider Caribbean. Libation prayer, drummed praise poetry and the festival calendar, above all Akwasidae on the sacred day cycle, keep the relationship among Nyame, abosom, ancestors and the living in constant repair.