Igbo religion sets a supreme creator, Chukwu, above a body of lesser deities and above the ancestors, and it is famously decentralised. There was no priesthood covering all Igbo communities and no political centre, so the shape of practice varies from one village group to the next. Elizabeth Isichei's history treats that absence of centralisation as the governing fact of Igbo life rather than an incidental feature of it.
The nearest and most demanding power is Ala, the earth goddess, who is the ground of law rather than of fertility alone. Offences described as nso ala, abomination against the earth, are the serious crimes, and they are crimes because the earth is offended by them. Herbert Cole's study of mbari houses records the most spectacular response to her: an entire building of moulded and painted clay figures, commissioned at a diviner's direction, made in seclusion by people called to the work, and then left to the weather, because the making is the offering and the object is not meant to last.
Each person also carries a chi, a personal spirit or portion allotted at birth, which is negotiated with rather than simply obeyed. The proverb that where a person says yes, that person's chi says yes too, is the tradition's own summary of how much room it leaves to the individual.