This chapter examines the aftermath of early Anglican missionisation to Makushi groups. It begins with a story that was told to the author of a past Makushi leader described by a villager in Surama as a false prophet. The chapter then discusses various prophetic movements that arose among the Makushi and neighbouring Indigenous groups during the 1840s and afterwards which culminated in the alleluia religion. These movements used material and immaterial objects acquired and appropriated from the missionaries for new purposes. Many of these movements emphasised a central theme of transformation, which was often described in colonial sources in terms of Indigenous people becoming ‘white’ in one form or another. The movements combined resistance to colonialism with Christianity, shamanism, and sometimes also sorcery. In this context, shamanism became a means for contacting the Christian God. The chapter foregrounds a shamanic relational mode that structures interactions with outsiders among the Makushi.

The Epilogue and Conclusion take as their starting point the developments in music and liturgy that occurred in the early years of Louis XIV’s reign – the earliest grands motets, the changes to the liturgical practices at the chapelle royale in the early 1660s, and Pierre Perrins’s pivotal publication, Cantica pro Capella Regis of 1665. Reflecting much broader cultural and social changes, the new musical and liturgical practices at court – now centered around music as an aesthetic construct – throw into sharp relief the practices of the earlier period (the reign of Louis XIII). While the grand motet was part of narrowly directed staging of power for a small and elite audience, Louis XIII was embedded in a universal musical/liturgical discourse, in which almost the whole population of France participated and therefore legitimated the king’s power.