ABSTRACT
In these mimetic worlds things connect with their invisible counterparts by virtue of the womb. The genipa plant Origin History introduces us to an important variety of magic, one to put alongside Frazer's double-layered sympathetic magic of Similarity and Contact. Inapiseptili in the golden box is moving in the golden box is moving. Inapiseptili in the golden box is swinging from side to side. One way of demonstrating this deflective fault-line that is disrupting but necessary to the logic of mimesis and alterity is to trace the jumps in Chapin's description of Cuna cosmology. This chapter emphasizes that while access and recourse to alterity—the Other world of spiritual reality—is both necessary and magically empowering, and that while that alter-world is deemed to be mimetic with the world of substance and modeled on it, there is also, as the reference to suddenly altering landscapes and jumping from signifiers to signifieds indicates, a curiously unstable aspect intrinsic to this mimetic doubling.
