The Cassowary is the great maternal being of Gimi thought, a wingless bird of the high forest imagined as a woman without a penis and as the archetypal, forbidden mother. Sources identify her closely with the First Woman, so that the primal ancestress and the cassowary-mother shade into one figure. She belongs to the wild alongside the dead of kore, and Gimi ritual and hunting imagery treats the killing or ritual assumption of the cassowary as a re-enactment of the son's severance from the maternal body. Her prohibitions, particularly around blood and menstruation, mark her as the pole against which male identity is defined.