The Lau were proud of their culture. They hoped that Maranda would share it with the world. But these secret names were different: they were a means of communicating and controlling the power of the spirits. They were not for sharing. It was as though the priests knew their knowledge was in danger, that their world was about to change, that their secrets needed a guardian.

aranda returned to the lagoon seven times over the next two decades. With each visit he found the pagan priests more anxious. Seventh-day Adventist missionaries had launched a crusade in the lagoon. The Adventists brought generators and loudspeakers so they could broadcast the Gospel for miles around. They said the spirits” —including the one that resided inside the Foueda octopus—were devils working to trick people on behalf of Satan. The priests told Maranda of the shouting matches they would have with Adventist missionaries on market days. The missionaries would arrive with colourful posters depicting heaven and hell. “If you remain wikita, this is where you will go when you die,” they warned the pagan priests, pointing at the fires of the underworld. “At least we will get to spend eternity with our own ancestors,” the priests would respond.

Christianity had its advantages: The children of Christian converts went to school. They learned to read in English, the new language of commerce and power. Christians didn’t need to spend time and energy raising pigs since the Adventists forbade the consumption of pork, not to mention blood sacrifices. Gradually, people switched allegiances, especially the young. Taboos separating men and women were dropped. The stone walls separating men’s and women’s areas were knocked down.

During a 1975 visit, Maranda was told by Laakwai, a senior Rere priest on Foueda, that the religion of the ancestors was dying. Laakwai could not find a successor, nor could the clan’s other high priest, Kunua. Not even the priests’ sons wanted the sacred knowledge. The young had all turned to the new god. After Maranda left that time, the two priests gave up hope. Laakwai swam under a canoe paddled by a woman, believing that such a reversal of high and low energy would be fatal. Kunua purposefully botched a ritual. Both priests were dead within weeks. It was suicide through metaphysical transgression. The people of Foueda’s primary link to their ancestors had been severed. More and more, they found themselves turning to Christianity.

eanwhile, at universities in North America and Europe, Maranda used his Lau data as raw material for his academic work, which was profoundly influenced by the pioneering French structuralist, Claude Lévi-Strauss. Lévi-Strauss argued that the most telling aspect of myths was not the unique meaning of words and symbols they contained, but the patterns they formed. He proposed that myths were part of a deep structure of binary opposites that direct how people connote signs and stories. When I reached him by phone at his Paris home, the ninety-seven-year-old Lévi-Strauss said that Maranda has been “paramount” in advan­cing his structuralist approach, particularly in the algorithmic treatment of anthropological problems.

Maranda’s method links language and stories—like those of the Lau—to the patterned activation of human brain cells. Reduce myth to an equation and you’ve begun to understand the human mind. For his innovative work in artificial intelligence, semantic mapping, and artificial imagination, Maranda was named a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and awarded the prestigious Canada Council Molson Prize in the Social Sciences and Humanities. The Lau storytellers were right: their myths did help propel Maranda to success and international recognition.

For all this, the anthropologist has yet to deconstruct the mechanism by which he has become the villain of the Lau octopus myth. “I have tried to understand how this story came about, who was responsible for it,” he told me. “It must have come through a divining, but who performed it I’ve never been able to get an answer.”

Yet the octopus story does contain elements of historical truth—and evidence of mythical thinking on Maranda’s behalf. Maranda did fall deathly ill a few months after his first stay in the lagoon. (He was diagnosed in Paris with falsiparum, a dangerous strain of malaria. Maranda promptly had money sent to the Solomons to pay the Rere priests for a sacrifice, after which he miraculously recovered.) True to the rumour, Köngäs-Maranda did die. She committed suicide in 1981.

After the suicide of the Rere high priests, Maranda came to be regarded as much more than an observer of Lau culture. During a 2003 stint working for the United Nations in the Solomon Islands, Luc Lafrenière, Maranda’s one-time research assistant, heard Maranda referred to as ngwane foa, a Lau term reserved for high priests. Henry Isa, the Solomon Islands’ chief cultural officer in 2002, put it to me this way: “The Rere clan has only one pagan priest left. That priest is Pierre Maranda.”

Maranda claims not to believe in the supernatural abilities of the Foueda octopus or any other spirit. He insists his faith is reserved for the laws of probability and the cognitive processes by which people constantly recalculate their trust rating for friends, colleagues, and myths. So it is especially curious to see him following a sacred code. Though the Lau Lagoon is a world away from Maranda’s favourite restaurants in Vieux Québec, though he once quite enjoyed the taste of, say, calamari, he now refuses to consume that or any other flesh resembling octopus. Maranda also refuses to reveal the secret name of the Foueda octopus to anyone other than a priestly successor. The man of science is, indeed, behaving as though he were the last of the Rere priests.