Ayumpum is the Jivaroan power presiding over life and death and, above all, over the passage between them. In myth Ayumpum is the source of new life won from the slain, and the figure stands behind the logic of the tsantsa, the shrunken head, whose ritual sought to capture and redirect the vital force of the killed enemy toward the fertility and continuity of the killer's own people. As a bringer of life and an appointer of death, Ayumpum joins the theft and renewal of vitality that runs through Jivaroan thought on warfare, souls and reproduction.