The auwa are the flute-spirits whose voices sound in the sacred paired bamboo flutes of the men's cult, played at initiation and mortuary festivals. Their interlocking cries are heard as the calls of forest birds and of the dead of kore, binding the flutes to the wild and to the ancestors. A widely attested Gimi myth of origin holds that the flutes and their power belonged first to women and were seized by men, so that male ritual secrecy re-enacts a theft; the flutes must be kept hidden from women and the uninitiated on pain of death.