Dirava is the Motu term for a supreme or creator spirit. In the traditional religion the word denoted a powerful supernatural being of sky and sea, standing apart from the spirits of the dead and from the localized clan and reef spirits with which everyday religious life was chiefly concerned. When the London Missionary Society translated scripture into Motu in the later nineteenth century, W.G. Lawes adopted Dirava as the name of the Christian God, and it is in this sense that the word is now most widely used. Scholars accordingly differ on how far the pre-Christian Dirava was conceived as a single high god as against a class of spirit-beings, a distinction the early sources do not resolve.