ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the relationship between power and the sacred, and then attemptS to circumscribe how symbolic control turns into a form of personalized ‘political’ control. Secrecy appears as the site of the cultural repression of that portion of knowledge which threatens to hobble and counter male power. The risk represented by this potentiality is the driving force behind the strategy of secrecy; and the full ambiguity of this potential comes out in the Yangis ritual, where the men, painted and masked, pretend to believe that the women believe that there are spirits under the masks, summoned from the forest by the men’s magic. The Masters of the Moon and the Sun seem to divide the procreating and feeding principles of the naturalistic maternal function between themselves: lunar gestation and cold versus solar breast-feeding and warmth. In this case more than in others, it is the representation that founds the religious office.
