The karökö are the sacred trumpets of the Munduruku, revered instruments whose sound is heard as the voices of the ancestral dead speaking from the other side of life. Kept in a closed section of the men's house and hidden from women, they must be fed with regular offerings of meat and a manioc drink, and their care structures the ritual life of the men. Their prohibition is grounded in the 'myth of matriarchy': in the founding time it was women who first discovered and owned the karökö, and while they held them women ruled and men did the work of the house and submitted to them; but because women could not hunt, they could not properly feed the trumpets, and so the men took the karökö from them, reversing the order of power. As embodied ancestral voices requiring sacrifice and seclusion, the karökö stand among the central sacred beings of Munduruku religion.