Asante religion places a remote creator, Nyame, above a body of lesser deities, the abosom, who are approached through priests and understood to derive their power from him. Kwame Gyekye's account of Akan thought sets out the anthropology that accompanies this. A person is composed of okra, the soul given by Nyame and returning to him, sunsum, the personality or spirit, and mogya, the blood inherited through the mother, which makes the matrilineal clan a religious fact and not only a social one.
The ancestors, the nsamanfo, are the nearest of the powers and the most constantly addressed. Libation opens any serious gathering, and the blackened ancestral stools kept in the stool house are the seat of a lineage's continuity rather than furniture. The Adae ceremonies, falling on a cycle set by the forty two day adaduanan calendar, are the occasions on which those stools are attended.
Above all of them stands the Golden Stool, Sika Dwa Kofi, which Asante tradition holds was brought down from the sky by the priest Okomfo Anokye for the first Asantehene, Osei Tutu, and which contains the soul of the nation. It is not a throne and is never sat upon. The British demand in 1900 that a colonial governor be permitted to sit on it produced a war, which is the plainest evidence available of what the object is understood to be.