433 Chapter Seven Cosmos For the Matsigenka of Shimaa, kameti ...

different now, not like the brothers. They came to marry them now, the brothers gave them their
sisters. They took the brothers to show them their spring, their traps. They drank beer.
The
brothers’ father now arrived. They saw him, he looked just as he had before. He said, “My sons,
you have come. I told you, if you went you would find me.” They were there. Then they went to
live in their own place.
There, now, see? Did you hear? Now, that is all.
This story may be understood on many levels. Most significant for our purposes is the
close association between the humans and the unseen ones. The father in the story is a shaman
whose soul flies regularly to the land of the unseen ones, where he changes places with his
counterpart there, who comes to occupy his body in this world. In the story, it is impossible to
tell from the text which he is at any given moment. The man who takes the sons on the journey
behaves like an unseen one. For example, he only eats a little meat off the back of the fish, just
like the unseen ones are said to do. Yet he is always, “Father.” The two are the same, or are
aspects of each other (cf. Baer 1979: 118).
And, too, the brothers in the story have their spirit counterparts, who look just like
them. These latter seduce their sisters, a subtext of brother-sister incest that is moderated at the
end of the story when the unseen ones become brothers-in-law and marry the sisters. The
mother, who is a minor character in this story, also has her counterpart in “that-one-like-yourmother”
frequently mentioned in the tale.
The unseen ones are idealized humans. As the title of the tale collected by Ross (1947:
45-6) suggests, they are immortal (Terira Ineero Igamane = “Not He-sees His-death”). In her
story, they do not suffer or die, they work little in return for ample food and clothing, and they
489