Mwari made the world, sends the rain, and is invoked at the edges of Shona life much as other regional high gods are, except for one distinguishing fact: Mwari has a cult and an address. At Matonjeni in the Matobo Hills of southwestern Zimbabwe, above all at the shrine of Njelele, a voice is heard to speak from the rock, and messengers travel to it from a wide area to bring petitions about rain and receive instruction in return. No other high god described in this atlas's African material has quite this institutional shape, a fixed shrine with resident officers rather than a figure approached only through prayer and oath.
Beneath Mwari, Shona cosmology holds two classes of spirit that are not interchangeable. The vadzimu are family ancestors, consulted and thanked by their own descendants for matters within a household or lineage. The mhondoro are different in kind: territorial spirits of dead chiefs, often described as lion spirits, whose concern is the land and rainfall of an entire chiefdom rather than one family's affairs. A mhondoro speaks through a spirit medium, a svikiro, whose possession and utterance are how the community learns what the ancestor requires of it, on questions of land use, rain and public conduct that reach well past any one household. The distinction between vadzimu and mhondoro, and Mwari's position above both, is the structure Michael Bourdillon's ethnography of the contemporary Shona records as still governing rural religious life.