Mahatala, also Mahatara and in institutionalised Kaharingan Ranying Hatalla Langit, is the supreme god of the Upperworld in Ngaju cosmology. He presides over the heavens from the summit of the primeval mountain, is imagined in the form of the great hornbill, and is bound to gold, the sun, and the upper right-hand half of the cosmos. In the account recorded by Hans Schärer the divinity is not a solitary sky-father but one half of a single total godhead whose other half is the watersnake goddess Jata of the Underworld; the two are at once a married pair and the two faces of one deity, and together they ordain the creation of the world and of humankind. The name is generally traced to Arabic Allah ta'ala, absorbed into an older indigenous high-god concept during long Malay-Muslim contact along the Barito.