Tui Tokelau ('Lord of Tokelau'), also called Tui Tokelau Sili ('the highest'), was the supreme deity of the three Tokelau atolls, an invisible and bodiless power dwelling in the sky who governed the fertility of the land and sea and the food supply of the people. He was made present on earth in a great upright slab of coral standing on the marae at Fakaofo, wrapped in layers of fine mats and housed in a sacred enclosure; this shrine, and the political pre-eminence of Fakaofo within the group, were closely bound together. Each year in about the month of May the people of all three atolls assembled at Fakaofo, prepared a feast, and prayed to Tui Tokelau for protection, continued abundance, and fertility, a rite that marked the renewal of the year. He was regarded as the father of the sea-god Te Moana. Knowledge of him was largely effaced after Christian conversion in the nineteenth century, surviving chiefly through the ethnographic record.