Lesa made the sky, sends the rain, and is invoked at the edges of Bemba speech, in oaths and in moments of wonder, but he keeps no shrine and receives no regular sacrifice. The religion's working attention goes instead to the imipashi, the spirits of the dead, who remain active members of the matrilineal family they belonged to in life. A senior ancestor's spirit may be understood to return in a newborn descendant, carrying the name and something of the character forward, and the imipashi are approached through diviners and mediums when illness, infertility or misfortune has no ordinary explanation. Alongside them stand the ngulu, spirits attached to particular places, pools and hills, who must be respected rather than worshipped in any regular sense.
Chieftainship folds directly into this structure rather than sitting apart from it. The paramount chief, the Chitimukulu, inherits not only a title but a set of sacred relics, the babenye, understood to carry the power of past chiefs, and installation rites bind the new chief to the spirits of his predecessors. A Bemba chief's authority is therefore religious authority as much as political authority, and the same logic that makes an ancestor present in a descendant's spirit makes a chief the living vessel of the chieftainship's accumulated dead.