The karõ is the spirit, shadow or image that constitutes a person's inner aspect and separates from the body at death. In Kĩsêdjê thought the dead do not vanish but re-form a parallel community, the village of the karõ, which mirrors the world of the living while remaining categorically apart from it. Because the karõ is bound up with the faculties of hearing and of song, the boundary between the living and the dead is porous to ritual knowledge: certain songs and powers are understood to travel across it. The concept anchors Kĩsêdjê eschatology and, through its links to sorcery and to the acquisition of song, connects the domains of death, music and witchcraft.