Indigenous religions have a hierarchy. At the lowest level there are rocks, earth and grass. Then come the animals among which mankind is in a superior position. Next come the more powerful spiritual people and the ancestors. Divinities come next. On the last level is the remote supreme being. Most of these primal religions have a belief in a creator god. Having created, this god is too great, very powerful and too distant to be worshipped directly; whenever there is something extraordinary he is called upon; he is believed to be all-seeing (Maybe a distant clue to one of the characteristics of the supreme being of our times?). This god is unbound by time, unbound by place and has no end. He is regarded as compassionate, but having an unpredictable nature. Man needs intermediaries, because he cannot get close to this superior being. Earthlings may communicate with lesser superior beings (So they needed a kind of a 'go between', as angels and archangels were needed in our times. So little has changed!). Most religious activity takes place around the lesser gods, around the spirits in everything, and especially around ancestors who are intercessors between the mankind on the one hand and his environment and god on the other. But ancestors are especially revered. Some of those ancestors are worshipped as gods. But their main role is mediation and facilitation. They watch over their community and warn them against the breaking of taboos.
Ancestors have a special place, but death is not welcomed. Death, except in very old age, is considered as unnatural. Here is a paradox; death is feared but death at the same time is the gateway to becoming an ancestor. Except that in Ashanti (a people living in Ghana) there is no doctrine of reincarnation and the spirits of ancestors do live in this world. They are ever-present and inhabit the living sometimes. There is an underlying relationship between the human being, society, animals, plants and the supreme beings, and care is taken to preserve this net of relationships. Many rites are directed towards the maintenance or to the reparation of relationship.
Most tribal groups have ceremonies for all the rites of passage: Birth, naming, initiation, marriage and death. Initiation takes different forms; often it means induction into adulthood. Sometimes initiation comes up as acceptance into secret societies.
