The sacred flutes are among the most closely guarded objects of the Angan male cult. Their sound is understood as the voice of a female spirit-being, and a myth told among the Sambia, recorded by Gilbert Herdt, and the Baruya, recorded by Maurice Godelier, holds that the flutes and the powers that go with them once belonged to women and were taken from them by men. Heard by the uninitiated as the cry of a bird or spirit, the flute-being embodies a female generative power appropriated for the making of men; boys meet it for the first time during initiation.