Namarsua is the creator god of traditional Ilocano religion, the maker of the heavens and the earth whose very name is built from parsua, the Ilocano verb 'to create'. Early ethnographers of the Ilocos, foremost among them Isabelo de los Reyes, recorded belief in a single originating maker who stands above the lesser spirits and enchanted beings of the everyday world. Sources differ on whether this supreme maker is fully distinct from the Cordilleran high god variously called Buni or Kabunian, names that appear in the same northern Luzon religious sphere; in Ilocano usage the creative act is consistently expressed through the root parsua, and Namarsua names the one who performs it.