Marespa is numbered among the great benevolent deities of Ifaluk, a protecting high god to whom a spirit-house was kept and offerings made. Some accounts recorded by Burrows and Spiro hold that he had once been a man who was raised to divinity, which set him among the tutelary gods rather than the malevolent alus, the harmful ghosts whose affliction of the living is the central preoccupation of Ifaluk religion. He exemplifies the benevolent side of a spirit world sharply divided between protecting gods and dangerous dead.