Faro is the demiurge and water-divinity of the Mande cosmological world, closely bound to the Maninka landscape of the Upper Niger. In the creation narrative Faro is sacrificed and then restored to life by the creator, who sends the demiurge down to earth to repair the disorder that entered the world at its making; with Faro descend the first human ancestors, born in complementary pairs. Faro is lord of fresh water, of the annual flood that fertilises the floodplain, of rain and rainbow, and of the ordering force of the spoken word. Ritual offerings are made at riverbanks and pools that are held to be the divinity's dwelling. Sources differ on whether Faro is best understood as singular or as a twinned, androgynous being, and the figure is one the Maninka hold in common with the neighbouring Bamana, whose cosmology forms a related branch of the same Mande inheritance.