Ebulobo is the active volcano rising above the Nage heartland of Boawae, and its name — from ebu, 'grandmother' or 'ancestor' — marks it as an ancestral presence rather than an inert mountain. The Nage live, in the phrase that titles the principal ethnography of their religion, beneath this volcano, whose slopes and caves recur in their traditions of the earliest inhabitants, among them the ebu gogo. As the commanding feature of the landscape and a source of both fertility and danger, the mountain is addressed as a guardian of the surrounding land and its people.