The Ambonwari from Papua New Guinea had a rich repertoire of songs and nearly all were connected with dancing. Together, they represent the entire life cycle of the individual as well as the whole village. Many of them were directly connected with the initiation of young boys. At the time when the villagers were still considering the option of performing initiation rites, it was undesirable to publish their songs. In the new millennium and under the infl uence of a charismatic Catholic movement, however, they abandoned the men's house and broke off the relations with their spirits. Nowdays such an embargo no
longer exists. The first song they sang during the dance before the novices were locked up in the men's house, was the song of a crocodile. The purpose of this article is to show how visual and verbal aspect are interwoven, and to present different transpositions of images and meanings, which derive from the dance, from the objects that are part of the initiation rite, and from the rich figurative language. These transpositions move at different levels until they touch the ontological and existential dimensions of birth and death. This is true of both the personal and cosmological levels. The second section of the article presents the village's Catholic charismatic movement, which finally rejected and abandoned the ritual. This section emphasises that historical, social, religious, or political interpretations may be useful in
everyday discourse, but that by themselves they are defective. To understand the essence of such social and cultural changes requires insight into the occurrences at the phenomenological and existential level, which are simultaneously occurrences at the level of the village's cosmology.