Adaheli was the personification of the

sun The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is a nearly perfect ball of hot plasma, heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core. The Sun radiates this energy mainly as light, ultraviolet, and infrared radi ...

in the Carib 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 , with 76.3 percent of it in Venezuela and the remainder in Colombia. It is the fourth largest river in the wor ...

region of

South America South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere at the northern tip of the continent. It can also be described as the southe ...

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

Suriname Suriname (; srn, Sranankondre or ), officially the Republic of Suriname ( nl, Republiek Suriname , srn, Ripolik fu Sranan), is a country on the northeastern Atlantic coast of South America. It is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the north ...

. 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 cayman as a variant spelling) is an alligatorid belonging to the subfamily Caimaninae, one of two primary lineages within the Alligatoridae family, the other being alligators. Caimans inhabit Mexico, Central and South America fro ...

. All of the original women were quite beautiful. However, some of the men were so ugly that the others found them to be literally intolerable. This led to the separation of the original people, with the ugly men going to the east with their wives and the others going to the west with their wives.See ''The Mythology of All Races''
Vol. XI, p. 262
(1920)

References

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