Yuruparí is the pan-Vaupés name for the ancestral being embodied in the sacred flutes and trumpets and for the male cult of initiation surrounding them, a tradition the Cubeo share with their Tukanoan and Arawak neighbours. In the widely told myth the instruments were first the possession of women, while men bore the household labours and were even able to menstruate; when men seized the flutes the natural and social order of the sexes was inverted, and women were thereafter forbidden on pain of death to look upon them. The being himself could be destroyed only by fire, and from his burning arose the palms and materials from which the flutes are made, so that his voice endures in their sound. Among the Cubeo the Yuruparí instruments are identified with the ancestral flutes left by the Kúwaiwa, and sources treat the flute-ancestor and the Kúwaiwa complex as facets of a single religious reality.