Bhagavan is the Baiga high god, a benevolent and essentially harmless creator who made the earth and living things. In the central creation cycle recorded by Verrier Elwin, the newly made earth trembled and would not hold still; Bhagavan therefore turned to the first Baiga to fix and guard it, so that the ordering and protection of the ground fall to the earth-priest rather than to the creator himself. Sources differ on whether the first ancestors were directly created by Bhagavan, born of the earth-goddess, or sprang from drops of the sage Vashishta's urine, but all agree that Bhagavan stands above and apart from the everyday spirits the Baiga propitiate.