The first chapter addresses the question of how folkloric beings, or godlings, ought to be defined, examining historic definitions of divine beings of a status lower than the greater gods, from Classical literature to contemporary anthropology. Turning to the British context, the chapter then discusses the evidence for the character of pre-Roman Iron Age religion, and assesses whether there is any evidence that elements of pre-Roman religion such as ‘animism’, therianthropic deities and ‘shamanism’ contributed to the distinctive character of godlings and popular religion in Roman Britain and thereafter. The chapter isolates certain characteristic (though not exclusive) features of godlings, including their identity as chthonic, non-human entities; their status as a multiple group rather than a single personality (in many cases); their status as objects of popular rather than official cults and their links with features of the natural landscape such as forests, groves and water sources.

Chapter 3 uses archival and anthropological sources to examine human encounters with Lake Tanganyika itself. The lake was a source of food, a barrier to cross, and the subject of religious and political innovation. How these features of human–lake encounters were understood shifted over time in ways that were related to the exchange of cultures and fluctuations in the lake’s level. In general terms, these shifts can be summed up as the ‘commercialisation’ of encounters with the lake, which affected how people crossed it, their motivations for doing so, and their means of appeasing spirits they believed to inhabit it. Technology, environmental factors, and religious paradigms with links to the wider Indian Ocean World affected how people crossed, used, and interpreted conditions on the lake.