Maknongan, or Mah-nongan, stands at the head of the vast Ifugao pantheon as the god most often glossed 'creator of all things' and the ultimate recipient of animal sacrifice. R. F. Barton's ethnography cautioned that the name derives from the vocabulary of offering and is also applied to honored dead, so that Maknongan functions less as a remote high god than as the focal figure of Ifugao sacrificial religion. In the creation tradition recorded by F. Landa Jocano, Maknongan and his wife Bugan together fashioned the world and its inhabitants.