Kauka
Kauka is at once the great paired flutes of the men's house and the spirit that sounds through them, the emblem of masculine religious authority among the Mehinaku. According to the tribe's most consequential myth the flutes once belonged to the women, who by holding them ruled the men's house and were the first keepers of ritual; the men wrested the instruments away by force and thereafter guarded them as their own. Since then Kauka's music may be played only by men, and a woman who looks upon the flutes is threatened with collective rape. The spirit thus stands at the center of what Gregor calls the anxious pleasures of Mehinaku life, where masculine dominance rests not on divine warrant but on remembered violence and the fear it sustains.
Domains
- sacred music
- masculine cult
Powers
- voice the sacred flutes
- punish women who look upon the flutes
Sources
- Kauka is the spirit of the sacred flutes and the focus of the Mehinaku men's cult, its music forbidden to the sight of women: Thomas Gregor, Anxious Pleasures: The Sexual Lives of an Amazonian People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985) (primary); Thomas Gregor, Mehinaku (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977) (primary)