ala (to "cure madness," as it was there translated), the Swedish pupils of Baron Nordenskiold, Nils Holmer and Henry Wassen, published alongside the text what they called, following their informant, the "secret" of balsa-wood-the wood of which the curing figurines were made and whose spirit is essential for the chant to be effective. This "secret" is the Origin History of balsa, born of woman in somewhat the same manner as described for the genipa, and Joel Sherzer, in his book on Cuna ways of speaking, informs us that with almost every chant is a "soul"-which he describes as a relatively short text in everyday though somewhat esoteric Cuna." This "soul," he says, "describes the origin of the object to be controlled by the chant. Likewise in the very chant (ikar) itself, origin is c

rucial, and he gives the example, "The Way of the Basil Plant" chant. The detailing is minute, the text repetitious, as if words heaped on words are delicately covering with baroque growth the silhouette and pulsations of what the words refer to, thereby recovering the reality described with fluctuating tissues of sound. Each line could be a caption to a picture, one picture strung next to the other: Inapiseptili [spirit name of the plant] in the golden box is moving In the golden box is moving. Inapiseptili in the golden box is swinging from side to side. In the

golden box is swinging from side to side. Inapiseptili in the golden box is trembling. In the golden box is trembling. Inapiseptili in the golden box is palpitating, In the golden box is palpitating. Inapiseptili in the golden box is making a noise. Inapiseptili in the golden box is shooting out. In the golden box is sh

• ooting out. Copies That Are Not Copies But just wh
• en it looked so neat and tidy, the ground starts to shift. Here was a new world brought to our attention by ethnography, an amazing world con
• sisting of material reality bound to spiritual copy extending m all directions as force.' But the mimetic faculty doesn't necessarily work that
• way. Remember in Hubert and Mauss' critique of F
• razer's sympathetic magic how they brought up th

e way the copy t at effects the original can be an imperfect copy, an "imperfect ideogram. '' Listen to Michael Lambek wrestling with this copy that is not a copy in his book Human Spirits, describing the spirits as conceived by people living on a small island in the Indian Ocean between the African mainland and Madagascar. On one page he says that the spirits lead lives parallel, but usually invi

sible, to humans." On the next page he writes that" "spirit society, although it does not mirror human society, IS a transformation of it." Think back to the basis of all simulacra and hence mimetic realization in this Cuna world (as it comes to us through ethnography)_the basis of the female body; the womb body parts, and the woman's seeing. For in bringing together in woman s body copying, reproduction, and origin, as so many moments of the mimetic, what we find is not only matching and duplication but also slippage which, once slipped into, skids wildly. You see this immediately in the fact that while the ethnography with enviable self-assuredn

ess describes the Cuna world as made up of spirit doubles, it later on proceeds to inform us without any sense of hesitation that the spirits of plants and animals and so forth exist in human form! This slippage is essential, and I presume its specification for any particular plan

t, animal, object, or person is its "secret" so that

we could abbreviate by saying that "secret" equals slippage. Origin History then becomes the attempt to trace the connection through history and from beginnings of how one thing becomes another thing while in some profound sense rema

ining the (mimetic) same-the sort of action of becoming different while remaining the same that we will