met Pierre Maranda at Université Laval on a June afternoon nearly two years after first hearing his name. Maranda wanted to show me his backyard. As we roared through Quebec City in his 1982 Turbo Porsche it was hard, at first, to judge the then-seventy-four-year-old anthropologist’s reaction to the strange accusations levelled at him. Not because he was incommunicative, but because his eyes were necessarily hidden behind a pair of wraparound sunglasses. His left cornea had been permanently scarred by the surface glare of the Lau Lagoon.

We reached Maranda’s home in Saint-Nicolas just as the sun was setting. He removed his glasses, squinted out over the St. Lawrence and gestured across his lawn. See No swimming pool. No octopus. He showed his empty yard to the bishop of Malaita on the bishop’s 2004 visit. Maranda wishes all the Lau people could see it.

“It is a very serious charge, that I would be responsible for the collective illness of people I have always loved,” he said, rubbing his scarred eyes wearily. “How could they entertain such thoughts about me”

By some measures, Maranda is eminently qualified to answer that question. As Canada’s leading structural anthropologist, he has spent half a lifetime reducing myths to mathematical algorithms in order to explain their function. But having fallen headlong into the mythology he once studied, Maranda can be forgiven for taking the story personally. Yet to follow Maranda inside his home and through the door guarded by two carved ebony spears is to begin to understand his place in the Lau narrative. Maranda’s study, his sanctuary, is arguably the greatest storehouse of Lau cultural knowledge in the world. The room is cluttered with mahogany ceremonial bowls, charcoal-blackened statues, rough-hewn pigs, and staffs adorned with serpents. One wall is dominated by a black-and-white photo of a naked Lau priest, eyes darkened in a state of ecstasy or possession. The rest are lined with audio tapes and folders jammed with notes on Lau myth, history, riddles, and linguistics. More than 100 musty notebooks contain scribblings from more than 100 Lau hands.

And then there is Maranda himself. The anthropologist probably knows more about Lau history and traditional cosmology than any living person in or out of the lagoon. He is the keeper of secrets and sacred codes that the Lau people believe are the means to control their spirits. He is the link between their past and their future. And so far, he has refused to pass the most sacred of those secrets back to the Lau.

This is Maranda’s version of history:

Having just completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University, he arrived in the Lau Lagoon in 1966 with his wife, Elli Köngäs-Maranda, and their two-year-old son. As researchers at the (now-defunct) Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies, the couple had been captivated by the idea that myths could function as maps for charting the human mind. Maranda could not believe his good fortune when he was dropped on Foueda. He had beat the missionaries. The people rubbed his skin to see if the powder that made him white would rub off. They were not sure if he was a spirit, a ghost, or a man. As he arrived, a small octopus, barely the size of a lobster, rose from the depths of the lagoon and swam to shore. Everyone agreed this was an endorsement from the spirit world.

Maranda learned the Lau language and befriended the pagan priests, particularly those of the powerful Rere clan. It helped that his name echoed that of their holy mountain on Malaita. He gained their trust. Over the following two years, the priests permitted Maranda to observe their rituals and collect their myths. The Lau had a complex and dangerous relationship with the spirit world. Life was governed by strict taboos handed down by the ancestors. Women were associated with the earth and fertility; life-giving power flowed from their vaginas. Men were associated with the sky, and they were careful not to violate the cosmic order by coming into contact with menstrual blood or by placing themselves below a woman’s pelvis. The people built walls in their villages to protect the most sacred aspects of life. Women retreated to their sanctuaries to menstruate and give birth. Male priests made their sacrifices at rock shrines and skull pits in their own enclosures.

The ancestor spirits would not countenance the presence of a foreigner inside the sanctuaries where skulls were kept, but the Lau priests allowed Maranda to fasten his tape recorder to a stick and poke it over the wall when they made their sacrifices. The priests knew full well that Maranda was collecting their secrets.

“They kept telling me: kede, kede, kede: write, write, write!” remembers Maranda. “And at the very end, when we told them we were leaving, the most knowledgeable people came to me and said, “There are things you don’t know, but you must know. All the sacred names of the spirits, all the sacred names of the sanctuaries, extremely secret knowledge, sacred names that empower magical formulas and rituals.’ This information was given to me in a sacred corner of the men’s area. It had to be whispered in my ear, sotto voce.”