The myth of the soul-theft turns out as a more and more complex series of appropriations and re-appropriations of images that run parallel to colonial land-grab, exploitation and genocide. Marina Warner has identified four stages in which this myth reveals “enduring stratagems of the imagination when the self feels under threat of incomprehension, and their resulting wider cultural expression”: “The idea of soul-theft by image provokes a feeling of shame in those who hold it, however unconsciously, because it is not rational, it is not scientific. So it is ascribed to an Other who is primitive -- noble and doomed; secondly the idea is then borrowed and reiterated, in a kind of false tribute... to the eternal wisdom of those noble, doomed people; thirdly, those same peoples, who have not been altogether successfully exterminated, repossess the idea as an original defining belief of their culture, and in this act of appropriation reassert their authority; fourthly, this repossession then inspires the former colonial annexers to realize that they must take charge of their representations, too.”