The ancestors are a functioning part of the household rather than a memory of it. They are addressed by name, given food and drink, informed of family news, invoked in oaths, and expected to intervene — particularly in disputes among their own descendants, where the egungun masquerade historically acted as a court. Becoming an ancestor is not automatic: it requires having lived to age, having had children, and having died and been buried properly, so the category is an achievement. The relationship runs both ways, since ancestors depend on their descendants to be remembered and fed, and a lineage that dies out abandons its dead. This is why childlessness is treated with such gravity in Yoruba thought, and why so much divination concerns fertility — the stake is not only the individual's comfort but the continuation of the people who have already died.