Adaheli was the personification of the

sun The Sun is the star at the centre of the Solar System. It is a massive, nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma, heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core, radiating the energy from its surface mainly as visible light a ...

in the Kalina mythology of the

Orinoco The Orinoco () is one of the longest rivers in South America at . Its drainage basin, sometimes known as the Orinoquia, covers approximately 1 million km2, with 65% of it in Venezuela and 35% in Colombia. It is the List of rivers by discharge, f ...

region of

South America South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a considerably smaller portion in the Northern Hemisphere. It can also be described as the southern Subregion#Americas, subregion o ...

. This sun god is referred to in an origin story collected in the early 20th century by , a missionary in

Suriname Suriname, officially the Republic of Suriname, is a country in northern South America, also considered as part of the Caribbean and the West Indies. It is a developing country with a Human Development Index, high level of human development; i ...

. In the story, Adaheli was troubled by the fact that there were no people on Earth, and so he descended to earth to create them. Shortly thereafter, people first appeared, born from the

caiman A caiman ( (also spelled cayman) from Taíno language, Taíno ''kaiman'') is an alligatorid belonging to the subfamily Caimaninae, one of two primary lineages within the Alligatoridae family (biology), family, the other being alligators. ...

. All of the original women were quite beautiful. The others, on the other hand, found some of the men to be downright intolerable because of their appearance. The ugly men moved to the east with their wives, while the others moved to the west with their wives, which caused the original people to split up.See ''The Mythology of All Races''
Vol. XI, p. 262
(1920)

References

South American deities Solar gods Kalina {{SouthAm-myth-stub