Ao ma, 'Heavenly Spirit', is the female creator recorded in the Encyclopedia of World Cultures account of Akha religion. She fashions the sky and the earth and then hands the Akha their code of life, the Akhazang, yet she is seldom the object of direct ritual, the everyday work of worship falling instead to the ancestors and to the Rice Mother. Sources differ on whether Ao ma and the supreme creator Apoe Miyeh are two names for a single high god or two distinct beings; the ethnographic record preserves both a masculine forefather-creator and this feminine sky-creatress, and the two accounts are not always reconciled within the same community.