Menjaya Raja Manang, the 'King of Shamans', is the divine founder of the manang, the Iban curing shaman. In the origin myth sickness first entered the world when the wife of his brother Sengalang Burong fell ill; called on to heal her, Menjaya became the first manang, discovering the rites of soul-recovery on which all later shamanic practice rests. Iban tradition further holds that in the course of taking up this calling he underwent a transformation of sex, becoming the archetype of the manang bali, the shaman who crosses gender. Every manang thereafter traced the authority of his craft to Menjaya, whose myth grounds both the shaman's power to retrieve the strayed soul of the sick and the ritually liminal status of the manang bali.