Mura, recorded by early observers as Mooramoora or Mura-Mura, is the being the Diyari of Cooper Creek speak of with reverence as the Good Spirit. The word mura denotes that which is sacred and ancestral, belonging to the Dreaming, and in its reduplicated form mura-mura names the whole class of ancestral creators; Mura is the benevolent creative power at the head of that conception. In the account the police-trooper Samuel Gason gathered in 1874, the Good Spirit did not shape living things directly but caused the Moon to bring them forth, and afterwards, petitioned by an assembly of elders troubled by the consequences of marriage between close kin, ordered the people divided into branches named after animals and other natural things, so that members of one branch might not marry within it. Later ethnographers, notably A.W. Howitt, recorded the continuing appeals made to Mura-Mura to send or to withhold rain.