‘Master’ or ‘Mistress of the Animals’ figures are actually very common in hunting societies; sometimes they take the form of a huge or perfect specimen of a certain type of beast, a kind of embodiment of the species, but at the same time they appear as human or humanlike owners of the species, to whom the souls of all deer, or seals, or caribou must be returned after hunters take them. In Amazonia, what this means in practice is that people avoid intervening in the reproduction of those particular species lest they usurp the role of spirits.
