This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Ainu Deities gathers Kamuy, the category itself, alongside four specific kamuy who fill it, showing how Ainu religion organizes divinity around visiting persons rather than a fixed pantheon.
Kamuy names a category rather than one figure: a person of another world who comes to this one wearing a body, most often an animal's, and who is owed the courtesies due to a guest. Bears, owls, foxes, fire, mountains, rivers, sicknesses and well made tools can all be kamuy. Ape-huci Kamuy, the grandmother of the fire, is the kamuy an Ainu household deals with every day, sitting in the hearth at the centre of the house, receiving the first of every offering and carrying what is said to the other kamuy, so that nothing reaches them except through her.
Two kamuy divide the natural world between land and sea. Kim-un Kamuy, the kamuy of the mountains, is met as the bear, coming down from the high country wearing its body and carrying its meat and fur as a guest's gifts, the sending ceremony returns him honoured and willing to come again. Repun Kamuy, the kamuy of the offshore sea, most often takes the form of an orca and drives whales and fish toward shore as gifts to hunters and fishing communities, the maritime counterpart to Kim-un Kamuy on land; a beached whale was understood as Repun Kamuy's direct gift and treated with the same ceremonial respect.
Kotan-kar Kamuy, whose name means the kamuy who made the settlement, is credited with shaping the Ainu homeland and setting it in order for habitation. Ethnographic sources differ on how this figure relates to Okikurmi, the culture hero credited elsewhere in the same oral tradition with teaching the Ainu to hunt and fish, some recording the two as the same figure and others as distinct.