9000 BCE onward · Africanspan
One Spirit Force in the sky, with named spirits as its faces
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Across the societies that speak Nilo-Saharan languages, the divine is understood as a single pervasive Spirit Force. Anthropologists working in a range of these communities settled on the word Divinity for it. The names used follow a consistent pattern: they tie Divinity to the sky, and through the sky to rain and often to lightning. People do call on particular named spirits for help, and they understand those spirits as manifestations of the one Divinity rather than as separate beings with standing of their own. Western theology has a term for exactly that relationship between the one and its appearances, hypostasis, and it took several centuries of argument to arrive at it. The Nilo-Saharan conception traces back to the ninth millennium BCE. It is a complete system with its own internal logic, and it sits alongside the Creator God of the Niger-Congo tradition as the second monotheism worked out in Africa long before comparable ideas surface anywhere in the Middle East.
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