Temu — also Temu edeni or Mue Edeni, 'master of the water' (mue, 'water', plus edeni, 'master') — is the Nanai master-spirit of the river world, the third of the great owners of the world-zones beside the masters of the taiga and the earth. For a people whose life turned on the salmon runs of the Amur, the water-master was among the most important spirits a fisherman could encounter: he was prayed and sacrificed to, offered food, and guarded against offence, for on his goodwill the catch depended. The cult of the water-master is shared across the lower-Amur peoples (Nanai, Ulchi and others) and is documented in the ethnographies of Lopatin and A. V. Smolyak.