Nemur is the lame spirit-being who legislated the rites and pronounced the curse that binds the Ishir. When the people rose up and destroyed the primordial Anaposo, Nemur escaped to a hill in the northern Chaco, and as he withdrew he decreed that the Ishir must forever reenact the spirit-beings in masked ceremony and keep the mystery secret, on pain of the death of the people. His curse is the sanction that underwrites the whole ritual order: to abandon the ceremony is to invite extinction. He is imagined as deformed or limping, a mark of his uncanny nature, and is bound to a particular hill of the homeland.