Meni is one of the supernatural ancestors of the He world and is bound up with the anaconda from which the Barasana derive. The exogamous phratries are reckoned as the common descendants of the Yebi Meni Anaconda people, so that his name stands near the root of the whole system of descent. In the myth cycle his daughters relentlessly pursue the child hero Warimi, and it is the youngest of them who at last catches the boy when he takes the form of an infant. Meni thus occupies the difficult ground between progenitor and antagonist, a being through whom the ancestral serpent, human descent, and the trials of the culture hero are woven together.