Kongo religion addresses a high god, Nzambi a Mpungu, who is not approached directly, and works instead through the ancestors, the bakulu, and through minkisi, objects charged with a spirit and with materials that direct it. Wyatt MacGaffey's study of the BaKongo describes an nkisi as a composed instrument rather than an idol. It holds medicines chosen for their names and properties, it is activated by words, and it has a defined job, whether healing, adjudication, or the punishment of a broken oath.
The figures driven full of nails and blades, which are the objects most often seen in museums, are one class among many. Each nail records a transaction: a case brought, an agreement sealed, an accusation lodged. What looks like violence directed at the figure is a record of use.
The scheme usually called the Kongo cosmogram is a cross within a circle, its horizontal line dividing the world of the living above from the world of the dead below, with the sun's course carrying a person from birth through maturity, death and return. Kimbwandende Fu-Kiau, writing from inside the tradition, presents it as a philosophy of life stages rather than as a map of geography, and the atlas records both his account and the scholarly readings that qualify it.