Pareni is one of the great primordial women of Matsigenka mythology, a culture-heroine of the ancestral age when the boundaries between people, animals, and plants were still fluid. In the cycle of tales gathered under her name she is bound up with the creation and transformation of the species: through her acts the many kinds of animals and plants take their present forms, and the myth of Pareni is remembered as an account of how the living world came to be sorted into its creatures. She moves through the narratives attended by a parrot reckoned her familiar. Her cycle is preserved above all in the river Picha tradition and in comparative Arawakan scholarship, where she stands among the transformer figures widespread in the southern Amazon.