The ĩ is the celestial component of the person, the vitality bound to consciousness that at death separates from the body and ascends toward the sky and the Maï. There it undergoes the cannibal-matrimonial passage that defines the Araweté afterlife: devoured by the true gods, resurrected from its bones by a magical bath, and remade as a shining immortal wedded to a Maï. The person, for the Araweté, is thus never complete in life but is realized only in death, when the ĩ is carried across into divinity. Its terrestrial twin, the specter that clings to the decaying body, follows the opposite path, downward and outward into the forest of the Añĩ.