The He Anaconda is the primal ancestral serpent, the living canoe in whose belly the founders of the descent groups travelled up the Vaupés from the eastern water door. Born of Romi Kumu when the Woman Shaman went downriver, it retraced its own journey and set the ancestors down at the waterfalls and rocks that became their homelands. The He, the domain of the sacred and ancestral to which the serpent belongs, is made present in ritual through the He instruments, the sacred palm-wood flutes and trumpets that are understood as the ancestor's bones and that carry his breath and song. Shown to novices in the great initiation known as the He House, these instruments make the anaconda's body and the origin of humanity tangible, so that the emergence of the clans is re-enacted in every generation.