p of the table. He

looked like a person, it is said. It looked like a person with a bud on his rear end, it is said [the genipa fruit has a sort of bud at one end]. The father received him and made him a person." (64) After that the different types of genipa plant-as persons-were born, following which the father and the mother made the ri



ver on which they were to live. The mother's vagina was

1. transformed into a golden tunnel through which the genipa people would travel when called by the medic
2. ine men, and her b for 75 miles.
3. reath became a golden wind to speed them in their canoes made from the lips of her vagina. From her large intestine the golden house of the genipa people was created, and her small intestine became the flags

that adorned that golden house. The fire fans that Cuna women use to fan t

1. he hearth were made from her clitoris, and the different colored flowers in the garden came from her m
2. enstrual blood. (65) So (with d
3. ifferent embellishments) we have the history for most everything in this womb-sprung world of disembodied color-seeing woman-a world that comes into being thr
4. Drive south on ough men chant
5. ing or whispering its origin. The Magic of Origins The genipa plant Origin Hi
6. story introduces us to an important variety of magic, one to put alongside Frazer's double-layered sympathetic magic of Similarity a
7. nd Contact. For now we see that chanting or whispering or simply ju
8. Turn right(west) onto Canyon Rd.st thinking a thing's origin gives the ritualist power over it. But let us not forget that here too it is necessary to make a simulacrum,
9. a verbal, toneful, simulacrum, by means of chanting over or under one's breath the birth-history of the thing in question. This put

s the power of historicism in a new light. Indeed the theme of knowing

1. something's history, in the sense of its conception and reproduction, is basi
2. c and ubiquitous to Cuna magic. It is one of the meanings of purpa
3. ("soul" and spI-25irit) given earlier. As Chapin put it: The "origin history"
4. of any one of a number of animals, material objects, medicines, and curing spirits is called its purpa. These origin histories are short orations in which the spirit in question i
5. s told how it lives, how it
6. behaves, and what its ritual names are. It constitutes the underlying "secre
7. t" of the spirit, and enables specialists to dominate and manipulate it as they please. (566) And he refers us to the aforementioned
8. Origin History of the genipa plant as an example. In the first Weste
9. Turn right (west) onto rn publication of the curing chant Nia-Igala (to "cure madness," as it was there translated), the Swedish pupils of Baron Nordenskiold, Nils Holmer
10. and Henry Wassen, published alongside the text what they called, following their informant, the "secret" of balsa-wood-the wood of w