THE TROPICAL FORESTS: THE AMAZON AND BRAZIL
I. THE AMAZONS[173]
On his second voyage Columbus began to hear of an island inhabited by
rich and warlike women, who permitted occasional visits from men, but
endured no permanent residence of males among them. The valour of Carib
women, who fought resolutely along with their husbands and brothers
gave plausibility to this legend; and soon the myth of an island or
country of Amazons became accepted truth, a dogma with wonder-tellers
and a lure to adventurers. At first the fabulous island seemed near
at hand--"Matenino which lies next to Hispañola on the side toward
the Indies"; but as island after island was visited and the fabled
women not found, their seat was pushed further and further on, till it
came to be thought of as a country lying far in the interior of the
continent or--for the notion of its insular nature persisted--as an
island somewhere in the course of the great river of the Amazons. By
the middle of the sixteenth century, explorers from the north, from
the south, from the east, from the west, were all on the lookout for
the kingdom of women and all hearing and repeating tales about them
with such conviction that, as the Padre de Acuña remarks,[174] "it
is not credible that a lie could have been spread throughout so many
languages, and so many nations, with such appearance of truth."
In 1540-41 Francisco de Orellana sailed down the Amazon to the sea,
hearing tales of the women warriors, and, as his cleric companion, Fray
Gaspar Carvajal, is credited with saying, on one occasion encountering
some of them; for they fought with Indians who defended themselves
resolutely "because they were tributaries of the Amazons," and he,
and other Spaniards, saw ten or twelve Amazons fighting in front of
the Indians, as if they commanded them ... "very tall, robust, fair,
with long hair twisted over their heads, skins round their loins, and
bows and arrows in their hands, with which they killed seven or eight
Spaniards." The description, in the circumstances described, does not
inspire unlimited confidence in the friar's certainty of vision, but
there is nothing incredible even in Indian women leading their husbands
in combat. Pedro de Magelhães de Gandavo gives a very interesting
account[175] (still sixteenth century) of certain Indian women who,
as he says, take the vow of chastity, facing death rather than its
violation. These women follow no occupation of their sex, but imitate
the ways of men, as if they had ceased to be women, going to war and
to the hunt along with the men. Each of them, he adds, is served and
followed by an Indian woman with whom she says she is married, and they
live together like spouses. Parallels for this custom, (and for the
reverse, in which men assume the costume, labours, and way of life of
women) are to be found far and wide in America,--indeed, to the Arctic
Zone. Magelhães de Gandavo is authority, too, for the statement that
the coastal tribes of Brazil, like the Carib of the north, have a dual
speech, differing for the two sexes, at least in some words; but this
is no extremely rare phenomenon.
More truly in the mythical vein is the account given in the tale of
the adventures of Ulrich Schmidel. Journeying northward from the city
of Asuncion, in a company under the command of Hernando de Ribera,
Schmidel and his companions heard tales of the Amazons--whose land of
gold and silver, the Indians astutely placed at a two months' journey
from their own land. "The Amazons have only one breast," says Schmidel,
"and they receive visits from men only twice or thrice a year. If a boy
is born to them, they send him to the father; if a girl, they raise
her, burning the right breast that it may not grow, to the end that
they may the more readily draw the bow, for they are very valiant and
make war against their enemies. These women dwell in an isle, which
can only be reached by canoes." In the same credulous vein, but with
quaintly learned embellishments, is Sir Walter Raleigh's account: "I
had knowledge of all the rivers between Orenoque and Amazones, and was
very desirous to understand the truth of those warlike women, because
of some it is believed, of others not. And though I digress from my
purpose, yet I will set down that which hath been delivered me for
truth of those women, and I spake with a cacique or lord of people,
that told me he had been in the river, and beyond it also. The nations
of these women are on the south side of the river in the provinces of
Topago, and their chiefest strengths and retracts are in the islands
situate on the south side of the entrance some sixty leagues within
the mouth of the said river. The memories of the like women are very
ancient as well in Africa as in Asia: in Africa these had Medusa for
queen: others in Scithia near the rivers of Tanais and Thernodon: we
find also that Lampedo and Marethesia were queens of the Amazons: in
many histories they are verified to have been, and in divers ages and
provinces: but they which are not far from Guiana do accompany with
men but once in a year, and for the time of one month, which I gather
by their relation, to be in April: and that time all kings of the
border assemble, and queens of the Amazons; and after the queens have
chosen, the rest cast lots for their Valentines. This one month they
feast, dance, and drink of their wines in abundance; and the moon being
done, they all depart to their own provinces. If they conceive, and be
delivered of a son, they return him to the father; if of a daughter,
they nourish it, and retain it: and as many as have daughters send
unto the begetters a present: all being desirous to increase their sex
and kind: but that they cut off the right dug of the breast, I do not
find to be true. It was farther told me, that if in these wars they
took any prisoners that they used to accompany with these also at what
time soever, but in the end for certain they put them to death: for
they are said to be very cruel and bloodthirsty, especially to such as
offer to invade their territories. These Amazons have likewise great
store of these plates of gold which they recover by exchange chiefly
for a kind of green stones, which the Spaniards call Piedras hijadas,
and we use for spleen stones: and for the disease of the stone we also
esteem them. Of these I saw divers in Guiana: and commonly every king
or cacique hath one, which their wives for the most part wear; and they
esteem them as great jewels."
The Amazon stone, or _piedra de la hijada_, came to be immensely
valued in Europe for wonderful medicinal effects,--a veritable
panacea. Such stones were found treasured by the tribes of northern
and north-central South America, passing by barter from people to
people. "The form given to them most frequently," wrote Humboldt,[176]
"is that of the Babylonian cylinders, longitudinally perforated, and
loaded with inscriptions and figures. But this is not the work of
the Indians of our day.... The Amazon stones, like the perforated
and sculptured emeralds, found in the Cordilleras of New Grenada
and Quito, are vestiges of anterior civilization." Later writers
and investigators have identified the Amazon stones as green jade,
probably the _chalchihuitl_ which formed the esteemed jewel of the
Aztecs; and it has been supposed that the centre from which spread
the veneration for greenish and bluish stones--chiefly jade and
turquoise--was somewhere in Mayan or Nahuatlan territory. Certainly it
was widespread, extending from the Pueblos of New Mexico to the land of
the Incas, and eastward into Brazil and the Antilles. That the South
American tribes should have ascribed the origin of these treasures
(at any rate, when questioned) to the Amazons, the treasure women,
is altogether plausible. Nearly a century and a half after Raleigh's
day, de la Condamine found the green jade stones still employed by the
Indians to cure colic and epilepsy,--heirlooms, they said, from their
fathers who had received them from the husbandless women. That the
Indians themselves have names for the Amazons is not strange--names
with such meanings as the Women-Living-Alone, the Husbandless-Women,
the Masterful-Women,--for the Europeans have been inquiring about such
women ever since their coming; it is, however, worthy of note that
Orellana, to whom is credited the first use of "Amazon" as a name for
the great river, also heard a native name for the fabulous women; for
Aparia, a native chief, after listening to Orellana's discourse on the
law of God and the grandeur of the Castillean monarch, asked, as it
were in rebuttal, whether Orellana had seen the Amazons, "whom in his
language they call _Coniapuyara_, meaning Great Lord."
Modern investigators ascribe the myth of the Amazons, undeniably
widespread at an early date, to various causes. The warlike character
of many Indian women, already observed in the first encounters with
Carib tribes by Columbus, is still attested by Spruce (1855): "I have
myself seen that Indian women can fight ... the women pile up heaps
of stones to serve as missiles for the men. If, as sometimes happens,
the men are driven back to and beyond their piles of stones, the women
defend the latter obstinately, and generally hold them until the
men are able to rally to the combat." Another factor in the myth is
supposed to have been rumours of the golden splendour of the Incaic
empire, with perhaps vague tales of the Vestals of the Sun; and still
another is the occurrence of anomalous social and sexual relationships
of women, easily exaggerated in passing from tribe to tribe.
A special group of myths of the latter type is of pertinent interest.
Ramon Pane and Peter Martyr give an example in the tale of Guagugiana
enticing the women away to Matenino. A somewhat similar story is
reported by Barboza Rodriguez from the Rio Jamunda: the women, led away
by an elder or chief, were accustomed to destroy their male children;
but one mother spared her boy, casting him into the water where he
lived as a fish by day, returning to visit her at night in human
form; and the other women, discovering this, seduced the youth, who
was finally disposed of by the jealous old man, whereupon the angry
women fled, leaving the chief womanless. A like story is reported by
Ehrenreich from Amazonas: The women gather beside the waters, where
they make familiar with a water-monster, crocodilean in form, which
is slain by the jealous men; then, the women rise in revolt, slay the
men through deceit, and fare away on the stream. From Guiana Brett
reports a myth on the same theme, the lover being, however, in jaguar
form. Very likely the story of Maconaura and Anuanaïtu belongs to the
same cycle; and it is of more than passing interest to observe that
the story extends, along with the veneration of green and blue stones,
to the Navaho and Pueblo tribes of North America, in the cosmogonies
of which appears the tale of the revolt of the women, their unnatural
relations with a water-monster, and their eventual return to the
men.[177]
[Illustration: PLATE XL.]
Vase from the Island of Marajó, with characteristic decoration. The
funeral vases and other remains from this region have suggested to L.
Netto that here was the fabled Isle of the Amazons (see pages 286-87).
The vase pictured is in the American Museum of Natural History.
Possibly the whole mythic cycle is associated with fertility ideas.
Even in the arid Pueblo regions it is water from below, welling up from
Mother Earth, that appears in the myth, and a water-dwelling being
that is the agent of seduction. In South America and the Antilles,
where fish-food is important and where the fish and the tortoise are
recurring symbols of fertility, it is natural to find the fabled
women in this association. And in this connexion it may be well to
recall the discoveries of L. Netto on the island of Marajó, at the
mouth of the Amazon.[178] There he found two mounds, a greater and a
smaller, in such proportion that he regarded them as forming the image
of a tortoise. Within the greater, which he regarded as the seat of
a chieftain's or chieftainess's residence,--commanding the country
in every direction,--he discovered funeral urns and other objects of
a quality far superior to those known to tribes of the neighbouring
districts,--urns, hominiform in character, many of them highly
decorated, and very many of the finest holding the bones of women.
"If the tradition of a veritable Amazonian Gyneocraty has ever had
any _raison d'être_," said Netto, "certainly we see something enough
like it in this nation of women ceramists, probably both powerful and
numerous, and among whom the women-chiefs enjoyed the highest honours
of the country."
II. FOOD-MAKERS AND DANCE-MASKS
"The rites of these infidels are almost the same," says the Padre de
Acuña.[179] "They worship idols which they make with their own hands;
attributing power over the waters to some, and, therefore, place a
fish in their hands for distinction; others they choose as lords of
the harvests; and others as gods of their battles. They say that these
gods came down from Heaven to be their companions, and to do them good.
They do not use any ceremony in worshipping them, and often leave them
forgotten in a corner, until the time when they become necessary; thus,
when they are going to war, they carry an idol in the bows of their
canoes, in which they place their hopes of victory; and when they go
out fishing, they take the idol which is charged with dominion over the
waters; but they do not trust in the one or the other so much as not to
recognize another mightier God."
This seventeenth century description is on the whole true to the
results obtained by later observers of the rites and beliefs of the
Amazonian Indians. To be sure, a certain amount of interpretation is
desirable: the _idolos_ of Acuña are hardly idols in the classical
sense; rather they are in the nature of charms, fetishes, ritual
paraphernalia, trophies,--all that goes under the name "medicine,"
as applied to Indian custom. And it is true, too, that in so vast
a territory, and among peoples who, although all savages, differ
widely in habit of life, there are indefinite variations both in
custom and mental attitude. Some tribes are but hunters, fishers, and
root-gatherers; others practice agriculture also. Some are clothed;
many are naked. Some practice cannibalism; others abhor the eaters
of human flesh. Any student of the miscellaneous observations on the
beliefs of the South American wild tribes, noted down by missionaries,
officials, naturalists, adventurers, professional ethnologists,
will at first surely feel himself lost in a chaos of contradiction.
Nevertheless, granted a decent detachment and cool perspective,
eventually he will be led to the opinion that these contradictions
are not all due to the Indian; the prepossessions and understandings
of the observers is no small factor; and even where the variation is
aboriginal, it is likely to be in the local colour rather than in the
underlying fact. In this broad sense Acuña's free characterization hits
the essential features of Indian belief, in the tropical forests.
More than one later writer is in accord with the implicit emphasis
which the Padre de Acuña places upon the importance on the food-giving
animals and plants in Indian lore and rite. On these food sources in
many parts of South America the abundant fish and other fluvial life
is primary. Hugo Kunike has indeed, argued that the fish is the great
symbol of fertility among the wild forest tribes, supporting the
contention with analysis of the dances and songs, fishing customs,
ornamentation-motives, and myths of these tribes.[180] Certainly he has
shown that the fish plays an outstanding rôle in the imaginative as
well as in the economic life of the Indian, appearing, in one group of
myths, even as a culture hero and the giver of tobacco. Even more than
the fish, the turtle ("the beef of the Amazon"), which is a symbol of
generation in many parts of America, appears in Amazonian myth, where
in versions of the Hare and the Tortoise (here the Deer replaces the
Hare), of the contest of the Giant and the Whale pulling contrari-wise,
and in similar fables the turtle appears as the Trickster. So, also,
the frog, which appears in magical and cosmogonical _rôles_,--as in the
Canopus myth narrated by Teschauer, where a man married a frog, and,
becoming angered, cut off her leg and cast it into the river, where
the leg became the fish _surubim_ (_Pimelodes tigrinus_), while the
body rose to heaven to appear in the constellation. The like tale is
told by other tribes with respect to Serpens and to the Southern Cross.
But important as water-life is to the Amazonian, it would appear from
Père Tastevin's rebuttal of Kunike's contention that the Indian does
not regard the fish with any speaking veneration. The truth would
seem to be that in South America, as in North, it is the Elders of
the Kinds, the ancestral guardians and perpetuators of the various
species, both of plants and animals, that are appealed to,--dimly and
magically by the tribes lower in intelligence, with conscious ritual
by the others. Garcilasso de la Vega's description of the religions
of the more primitive stratum of Peruvian times and peoples applies
equally to the whole of America: "They venerated divers animals, some
for their cruelty, as the tiger, the lion, the bear;... others for
their craft, as the monkeys and the fox; others for fidelity, as the
dog; for quickness, as the lynx;... eagles and hawks for their power
to fly and supply themselves with game; the owl for its power to see in
the dark.... They adored the earth, as giving them its fruits; the air,
for the breath of life; the fire which warmed them and enabled them to
eat properly; the llama which supplied troops of food animals;... the
maize which gave them bread, and the other fruits of their country.
Those dwelling on the coast had many divinities, but regarded the sea
as the most potent of all, calling it their mother, because of the
fish which it furnished with which they nourished their lives. All
these, in general, venerated the whale because of its hugeness; but
beside this, commonly in each province they devoted a particular cult
to the fish which they took in greatest abundance, telling a pleasant
tale to the effect that the First of all the Fish dwells in the sky,
engendering all of its species, and taking care, each season, to send
them a sufficiency of its kind for their good." Père Tastevin bears
witness to the same belief today: "To be successful in fishing, it is
not to the fish that the Indian addresses himself, but to the mother of
the animal he would take. If he goes to fish the turtle, he must first
strike the prow of his canoe with the leaf of a small caladium which
is called _yurará taya_, caladium of the turtle; he will strike in the
same fashion the end of his turtle harpoon and the point of his arrow,
and often he will carry the plant in his canoe. But let him beware lest
he take the first turtle! She is the grandmother of the others; she is
of a size which confounds the imagination, and she will drag down with
her the imprudent fisherman to the bottom of the waters, where she will
give him a fever without recovery. But if he respect her, he will be
successful in his fishing for the rest of the day."
Universal among the tropical wild tribes is the love of dancing. In
many of the tribes the dances are mask dances, the masks representing
animals of all kinds; and the masks are frequently regarded as _sacra_,
and are tabu to the women. In other cases, it is just the imitative
powers of the child of nature that are called upon, and authorities
agree that the Indian can and does imitate every kind of bird, beast,
and fish with a bodily and vocal verisimilitude that gives to these
dances, where many participate, the proper quality of a pandemonium.
Authorities disagree as to the intent of the dancing; it is obvious to
all that they are occasions of hilarity and fun; it is evident again
that they lead to excitement, and especially when accompanied by the
characteristic potations of native liquors, to warlike, sexual, or
imaginative enthusiasm. Whether there is conscious magic underlying
them (as cannot be doubted in the case of the similar dances of North
America) is a matter of difference of opinion, and may well be a matter
of differing fact,--the less intellectual tribes following blindly that
instinct for rhythm and imitation which, says Aristotle, is native
to all men, while with the others the dance has become consciously
ritualized. Cook says[181] of the Bororo _bakororó_--a medley of
hoots, squeaks, snorts, chirps, growls, and hisses, accompanied
with appropriate actions,--that it "is always sung on the vesper
of a hunting expedition, and seems to be in honor of the animal the
savages intend to hunt the following day.... After the singing of the
_bakororó_ that I witnessed, all the savages went outside the great
hut, where they cleared a space of black ground, then formed animals
in relief with ashes, especially the figure of the tapir, which they
purposed to hunt the next day." This looks like magic,--though, to be
sure, one need not press the _similia similibus_ doctrine too far:
human beings are gifted with imagination and the power of expressing
it, and it is perhaps enough to assume that imitative and mask dances,
images like to those described, or like the bark-cut figures and other
animal signs described by von den Steinen among the Bakairi and other
tribes, are all but the natural exteriorization of fantasy, perhaps
vaguely, perhaps vividly, coloured with anticipations of the fruits of
the chase.
If anything, there seems to be a clearer magical association in rites
and games connected with plants than with those that mimic animals.
Especially is this true of the manioc, or cassava, which is important
not only as a food-giving plant, but as the source of a liquor, and,
again, is dangerous for its poison,--which, as Teschauer remarks, must
have caused the death of many during the long period in which the use
of the plant was developed. Père Tastevin describes men and women
gathering about a trough filled with manioc roots, each with a grater,
and as they grate rapidly and altogether, a woman strikes up the song:
"A spider has bitten me! A spider has bitten me! From under the leaf of
the _kará_ a spider has bitten me!" The one opposite answers: "A spider
has bitten me! Bring the cure! Quick, make haste! A spider has bitten
me!" And all break in with _Yandú se suú_, by which is understood
nothing more than just the rhythmic tom-tom on the grater. Similar is
the song of the _sudarari_--a plant whose root resembles the manioc,
which multiplies with wonderful rapidity, and the presence of which in
a manioc field is regarded as insuring large manioc roots: "Permit,
O patroness, that we sing during this beautiful night!" with the
refrain, "_Sudarari!_" This, says Père Tastevin, is the true symbol of
the fertility of fields, shared in a lesser way by certain other roots.
It is small wonder that the spirit or genius of the manioc figures in
myth, nor is it surprising to find that the predominant myth is based
on the motive of the North American Mondamin story. Whiffen remarks,
of the north-western Amazonians:[182] "What I cannot but consider the
most important of their stories are the many myths that deal with the
essential and now familiar details of everyday life in connexion with
the _manihot utilissima_ and other fruits"; and he goes on to tell a
typical story: The Good Spirit came to earth, showed the manioc to the
Indians, and taught them to extract its evils; but he failed to teach
them how the plant might be reproduced. Long afterward a virgin of
the tribe, wandering in the woods, was seduced by a beautiful young
hunter, who was none other than the manioc metamorphosed. A daughter
born of this union led the tribe to a fine plantation of manioc, and
taught them how to reproduce it from bits of the stalk. Since then the
people have had bread. The more elaborate version of Couto de Magalhães
tells how a chief who was about to kill his daughter when he found her
to be with child, was warned in a dream by a white man not to do so,
for his daughter was truly innocent and a virgin. A beautiful white
boy was born to the maiden, and received the name Mani; but at the end
of a year, with no apparent sign of ailing, he died. A strange plant
grew upon his grave, whose fruit intoxicated the birds; the Indians
then opened the grave, and in place of the body of Mani discovered
the manioc root, which is thence called _Mani-oka_, "House of Mani."
Teschauer gives another version in which Mani lived many years and
taught his people many things, and at the last, when about to die told
them that after his death they should find, when a year had passed, the
greatest treasure of all, the bread-yielding root.
It is probable that some form of the Mani myth first suggested to
pious missionaries the extension of the legendary journeys of Saint
Thomas among the wild tribes of the tropics. From Brazil to Peru, says
Granada,[183] footprints and seats of _Santo Tomás Apóstol_, or _Santo
Tomé_, are shown; and he associates these tales with the dissemination
and cultivation of the all-useful herb, as probably formed by a
Christianizing of the older culture myth. Three gifts are ascribed to
the apostle,--the treasure of the faith, the cultivation of the manioc,
and relief from epidemics. "Keep this in your houses," quoth the saint,
"and the divine mercy will never withhold the good." The three gifts--a
faith, a food, and a medicine,--are the almost universal donations
of Indian culture heroes, and it is small wonder if minds piously
inclined have found here a meeting-ground of religions. An interesting
suggestion made by Señor Lafone Quevado would make Tupan, Tupa,
Tumpa,--the widespread Brazilian name for god,--if not a derivative, at
least a cognate form of Tonapa, the culture hero of the Lake Titicaca
region, who was certainly identified as Saint Thomas by missionaries
and Christian Indians at a very early date. That the myth itself is
aboriginal there can be no manner of doubt,--Bochica and Quetzalcoatl
are northern forms of it; nor need we doubt that Tupa or Tonapa is a
native high deity--in all probability celestial or solar, as Lafone
Quevado believes. The union of native god and Christian apostle is but
the pretty marriage of Indian and missionary faiths.
One of the most poetical of Brazilian vegetation myths is told by
Koch-Grünberg in connexion with the Yurupari festival,--a mask dance
(_yurupari_ means just "mask" according to Père Tastevin, although some
have given it the significance of "demon") celebrated in conjunction
with the ripening of fruits of certain palms. Women and small boys are
excluded from the fête; indeed, it is death for women even to see the
flutes and pipes,--as Humboldt said was true of the sacred trumpet of
the Orinoco Indians in his day. The legend turns on the music of the
pipes, and is truly Orphic in spirit.... Many, many years ago there
came from the great Water-House, the home of the Sun, a little boy who
sang with such wondrous charm that folk came from far and near to see
him and harken. Milómaki, he was called, the Son of Miló. But when the
folk had heard him, and were returned home, and ate of fish, they fell
down and died. So their kinsfolk seized Milómaki, and built a funeral
pyre, and burnt him, because he had brought death amongst them. But
the youth went to his death still with song on his lips, and as the
flames licked about his body, he sang: "Now I die, my son! now I leave
this world!" And as his body began to break with the heat, still he
sang in lordly tones: "Now bursts my body! now I am dead!" And his body
was destroyed by the flames, but his soul ascended to heaven. From the
ashes on the same day sprang a long green blade, which grew and grew,
and even in another day had become a high tree, the first paxiuba
palm. From its wood the people made great flutes, which gave forth as
wonderful melodies as Milómaki had aforetime sung; and to this day the
men blow upon them whenever the fruits are ripe. But women and little
boys must not look upon the flutes, lest they die. This Milómaki, say
the Yahuna, is the Tupana of the Indians, the Spirit Above, whose mask
is the sky.
[Illustration: PLATE XLI.]
Dance or ceremonial masks of Brazilian Indians, now in the Peabody
Museum.
The region about the headwaters of the Rio Negro and the Yapura--the
scene of Koch-Grünberg's travels--is the centre of the highest
development of the mask dances, which seem to be recent enough
with some of the tribes. In the legends of the Kabéua it is Kuai,
the mythic hero and fertility spirit of the Arawak tribes, who is
regarded as the introducer of the mask dances,--Kuai, who came with
his brethren from their stone-houses in the hills to teach the dances
to his children, and who now lives and dances in the sky-world. This
is a myth which immediately suggests the similar tales of Zuñi and
the other Pueblos, and the analogy suggested is more than borne out
by what Koch-Grünberg[184] tells of the Katcina-like character of
the masks. They all represent spirits or daemones. They are
used in ceremonies in honour of the ancestral dead, as well as in
rituals addressed to nature powers. Furthermore, the spirit or daemon
is temporarily embodied in the mask,--"the mask _is_ for the Indian
the daemon"; though, when the mask is destroyed at the end of a
ceremonial, the Daemon of the Mask does not perish; rather he becomes
_máskara-anga_, the Soul of the Mask; and, now invisible, though still
powerful, he flies away to the Stone-house of the Daemones, whence only
the art of the magician may summon him. "All masks are Daemones," said
Koch-Grünberg's informant, "and all Daemones are lords of the mask."
III. GODS, GHOSTS, AND BOGEYS
What are the native beliefs of the wild tribes of South America about
gods, and what is their natural religion? If an answer to this question
may be fairly summarized from the expressions of observers, early and
recent, it is this: the Indians generally believe in good powers and
in evil powers, superhuman in character. The good powers are fewer and
less active than the evil; at their head is the Ancient of Heaven.
Little attention is paid to the Ancient of Heaven, or to any of the
good powers,--they are good, and do not need attention. The evil powers
are numerous and busy; the wise man must be ever on the alert to evade
them,--turn them when he can, placate when he must.
Cardim is an early witness as to the beliefs of the Brazilian
Indians.[185] "They are greatly afraid of the Devil, whom they call
Curupira, Taguain, Pigtangua, Machchera, Anhanga: and their fear of
him is so great, that only with the imagination of him they die, as
many times already it hath happened."... "They have no proper name
to express God, but they say the Tupan is the thunder and lightning,
and that this is he that gave them the mattocks and the food, and
because they have no other name more natural and proper, they call
God Tupan." Thevet says that "Toupan" is a name for the thunder or
for the Great Spirit. Keane says of the Botocudo, perhaps the lowest
of the Brazilian tribes: "The terms Yanchang, Tapan, etc., said to
mean God, stand merely for spirit, demon, thunder, or at the most the
thunder-god." Of these same people Ehrenreich reports: "The conception
of God is wanting; they have no word for it. The word Tupan, appearing
in some vocabularies, is the well-known Tupi-Guaranian word, spread
by missionaries far over South America. The Botocudo understand by
it, not God, but the Christian priest himself!" Neither have they a
word for an evil principle; but they have a term for those souls of
the departed which, wandering among men at night, can do them every
imaginable ill, and "this raw animism is the only trace of religion--if
one can so call it--as yet observed among them." Hans Staden's account
of the religion of the Tupinambi, among whom he fell captive, drops the
scale even lower: their god, he says, was a calabash rattle, called
_tammaraka_, with which they danced; each man had his own, but once a
year the _paygis_, or "prophets," pretended that a spirit come from
a far country had endowed them with the power of conversing with all
Tammarakas, and they would interpret what these said. Women as well
as men could become paygis, through the usual Indian road to such
endowment, the trance.
Similar in tenor is a recent account of the religion of the
Bororo.[186] The principal element in it is the fear of evil spirits,
especially the spirits of the dead. Bope and Mareba are the chief
spirits recognized. "The missionaries spoke of the Bororos believing
in a good spirit (Mareba) who lives in the fourth heaven, and who
has a _filha Mareba_ (son), who lives in the first heaven, but it is
apparent that the priest merely heard the somewhat disfigured doctrines
that had been learned from some missionary."... But why, asks the
reader, should this conception come from the missionary rather than the
Bororo in South America, when its North American parallel comes from
the Chippewa rather than from the missionary?... "In reality Bope is
nothing else than the Digichibi of the Camacoco, Nenigo of the Kadioéo
men, or Idmibi of the Kadioéo women, the Ichaumra or Ighamba of the
Matsikui, i. e., the human soul, which is regarded as a bad spirit....
The Bororo often make images of animals and Bope out of wax. After they
have been made they are beaten and destroyed."
Of the Camacan, a people of the southern part of Bahia, the Abbé Ignace
says that while they recognize a supreme being, Gueggiahora, who
dwells, invisible, above the stars which he governs, yet they give him
no veneration, reserving their prayers for the crowd of spirits and
bogeys--ghosts of the dead, thunderers and storm-makers, were-beasts,
and the like, that inhabit their immediate environment, forming, as it
were, earth's atmosphere. The Chorotes, too, believe in good and in bad
spirits, paying their respects to the latter; while their neighbours,
the Chiriguano, hold that the soul, after death, goes to the kingdom
of the Great Spirit, Tumpa, where for a time he enjoys the pleasures
of earth in a magnified degree; but this state cannot last, and in a
series of degenerations the spirit returns to earth as a fox, as a
rat, as a branch of a tree, finally to fall into dissolution with the
tree's decay. Tumpa is, according to Pierini, the same as Tupa, the
beneficent supreme spirit being known by these names among the Guarayo,
although in their myths the principal personages are the hero brothers,
Abaangui and Zaguaguayu, lords of the east and the west, and two other
personages, Mbiracucha (perhaps the same as the Peruvian Viracocha) and
Candir, the last two, like Abaangui, being shapers of lands and fathers
of men.
D'Orbigny[187] describes a ritual dance of the Guarayo, men and women
together, in which hymns were addressed to Tamoi, the Grandfather or
Ancient of the Skies, who is called upon to descend and listen. "These
hymns," he says, "are full of naïve figures and similitudes. They are
accompanied by sounding reeds, for the reason that Tamoi ascended
toward the east from the top of a bamboo, while spirits struck the
earth with its reeds. Moreover, the bamboo being one of the chief
benefactions of Tamoi, they consider it as the intermediary between
them and the divinity." Tamoi is besought in times of seeding, that he
may send rain to revive the thirsting earth; his temple is a simple
octagonal hut in the forest. "I have heard them ask of nature, in a
most figurative and poetic style, that it clothe itself in magnificent
vestments; of the flowers, that they bloom; of the birds, that they
take on their richest plumage and resume their joyous song; of the
trees, that they bedeck themselves with verdure; all to the end that
these might join with them in calling upon Tamoi, whom they never
implored in vain."
In another connexion d'Orbigny says: "The Guarani, from the Rio de la
Plata to the Antilles and from the coasts of Brazil to the Bolivian
Andes, revere, without fearing him, a beneficent being, their first
father, Tamoi, or the Ancient of the Skies, who once dwelt among them,
taught them agriculture, and afterwards disappeared toward the East,
from whence he still protects them." Doubtless, this is too broad a
generalization, and d'Orbigny's own reports contain numerous references
to tribes who fear the evil rather than adore the good in nature.
Nevertheless, there is not wanting evidence looking in the other
direction. One of the most recent of observers, Thomas Whiffen, says
of the northwest Brazilian tribes:[188] "On the whole their religion is
a theism, inasmuch as their God has a vague, personal, anthropomorphic
existence. His habitat is above the skies, the blue dome of heaven,
which they look upon as the roof of the world that descends on all
sides in contact with the earth. Yet again it is pantheism, this God
being represented in all beneficent nature; for every good thing is
imbued with his spirit, or with individual spirits subject to him."
According to Whiffen's account the Boro Good Spirit, Neva (in the
same tribe Navena is the representative of all evil), once came to
earth, assuming human guise. The savannahs and other natural open
places, where the sun shines freely and the sky is open above, are
the spots where he spoke to men. But a certain Indian vexed Neva, the
Good Spirit, so that he went again to live on the roof of the world;
but before he went, he whispered to the tigers, which up to that time
had hunted with men as with brothers, to kill the Indians and their
brethren.
It is easy to see, from such a myth as this, how thin is the line that
separates good and evil in the Indian's conception,--indeed, how hazy
is his idea of virtue. Probably the main truth is that the Amazonian
and other wild tribes generally believe in a Tupan or Tamoi, who is on
the whole beneficent, is mainly remote and indifferent to mankind, and
who, when he does reveal himself, is most likely to assume the form
of (to borrow Whiffen's phrase) "a tempestipresent deity." "Although
without temples, altars or idols," says Church, of the tribes of the
Gran Chaco, "they recognize superior powers, one of whom is supreme and
thunders from the sierras and sends the rain." Olympian Zeus himself is
the Thunderer; in Scandinavia Tiu grows remote, and Thor with his levin
is magnified. Similarly, in North America, the Thunderbirds loom huger
in men's imagination than does Father Sky. On the whole for the South
American tribes, the judgement of Couto de Magalhães seems sane; that
the aboriginals of Brazil possessed no idea of a single and powerful
God, at the time of the discovery, and indeed that their languages were
incapable of expressing the idea; but that they did recognize a being
superior to the others, whose name was Tupan. Observers from Acuña
to Whiffen have noted individual sceptics among the Indians; certain
tribes even (though the information is most likely from individuals)
are said to believe in no gods and no spirits; and in some tribes the
beliefs are obviously more inchoate than in others. But in the large,
the South Americans are at one with all mankind in their belief in a
Spirit of Good, whose abode is the Above, and in their further belief
in multitudes of dangerous spirit neighbours sharing with them the Here.
IV. IMPS, WERE-BEASTS, AND CANNIBALS
It would be a mistake to assume that all of these dangerous neighbours
are invariably evil, just as it is erroneous to expect even the Ancient
of the Skies to be invariably beneficent. In Cardim's list of the
Brazilian names of the Devil he places first the Curupira.[189] But
Curupira, or Korupira (as Teschauer spells it), is nearer to the god
Pan than to Satan. Korupira is a daemon of the woods, guardian of all
wild things, mischievous and teasing even to the point of malice and
harm at times, but a giver of much good to those who approach him
properly: he knows the forest's secrets and may be a wonderful helper
to the hunter, and he knows, too, the healing properties of herbs.
Like Pan he is not afoot like a normal man; and some say his feet turn
backward, giving a deceptive trail; some say that his feet are double;
some that he has but one rounded hoof. He is described as a dwarf,
bald and one-eyed, with huge ears, hairy body, and blue-green teeth,
and he rides a deer or a rabbit or a pig. He insists that game animals
be killed, not merely wounded, and he may be induced to return lost
cattle,--for he is a propitiable sprite, with a fondness for tobacco. A
tale which illustrates his character, both for good and evil, is of the
unlucky hunter, whom, in return for a present of tobacco, the Korupira
helps; but the hunter must not tell his wife, and when she, suspecting
a secret, follows her husband, the Korupira kills her. In another
story the hunter, using the familiar ruse of pretended self-injury by
means of which Jack induces the Giant to stab himself (an incident in
which Coyote often figures in North America), gets the Korupira to
slay himself; after a month he goes back to get the blue teeth of his
victim, but as he strikes them the Korupira comes to life. He gives
the hunter a magic bow, warning him not to use it against birds; the
injunction is disobeyed, the hunter is torn to pieces by the angry
flocks, but the Korupira replaces the lost flesh with wax and brings
the hunter to life. Again, he warns the hunter not to eat hot things;
the latter disobeys, and forthwith melts away.
Another "devil" mentioned by Cardim is the Anhanga. The Anhanga is
formless, and lives indeed only in thought, especially in dreams; in
reality, he is the Incubus, the Nightmare. The Anhanga steals a child
from its mother's hammock, and puts it on the ground beneath. The child
cries, "Mother! Mother! Beware the Anhanga which lies beneath us!" The
mother strikes, hitting the child; while the laughing Anhanga departs,
calling back, "I have fooled you! I have fooled you!" In another tale,
which recalls to us the tragedy of Pentheus and Agave, a hunter meets
a doe and a fawn in the forest. He wounds the fawn, which calls to its
mother; the mother returns, and the hunter slays her, only to discover
that it is his own mother, whom the wicked sprite (here the Yurupari)
had transformed into a doe.
But even more to be feared than the daemones are the ghosts and
beast-embodied souls.[190] Like most other peoples in a parallel stage
of mental life, the South American Indians very generally believe in
metempsychosis, souls of men returning to earth in animal and even
vegetal forms, and quite consistently with the malevolent purpose of
wreaking vengeance upon olden foes. The belief has many characteristic
modifications: in some cases the soul does not leave the body until
the flesh is decayed; in many instances it passes for a time to a life
of joy and dancing, a kind of temporary Paradisal limbo; but always it
comes sooner or later back to fulfill its destiny as a were-beast.[191]
The South American tiger, or jaguar, is naturally the form in which
the reincarnate foe is most dreaded, and no mythic conception is wider
spread in the continent than is that of the were-jaguar, lying in wait
for his human foe,--who, if Garcilasso's account of jaguar-worshipping
tribes is correct, offered themselves unresistingly when the beast was
encountered.
It is probable that the conception of the were-jaguar, or of beast
reincarnations, is associated in part at least with the enigmatical
question of tropical American cannibalism.[192] A recent traveller,
J. D. Haseman, who visited a region of reputed cannibalism, and found
no trace of the practice, is of the opinion that it has no present
existence, if indeed it ever had any. But against this view is the
unanimous testimony of nearly all observers, with explicit descriptions
of the custom, from Hans Staden and Cardim down to Koch-Grünberg and
Whiffen. Hans Staden, who was held as a slave among the Tupinambi of
the Brazilian coast, describes a visit which he made to his Indian
master for the purpose of begging that certain prisoners be ransomed.
"He had before him a great basket of human flesh, and was busy gnawing
a bone. He put it to my mouth and asked if I did not wish to eat. I
said to him: 'There is hardly a wild animal that will eat its kind;
how then shall I eat human flesh?' Then he, resuming his meal: 'I am a
tiger, and I find it good.'" Cardim's description of cannibal rites is
in many ways reminiscent of the Aztec sacrifice of the devoted youth
to Tezcatlipoca: the victim is painted and adorned, is given a wife,
and indeed so honoured that he does not even seek to escape,--"for
they say that it is a wretched thing to die, and lie stinking, and
eaten with worms"; throughout, the ritual element is obvious. On the
other hand, the conception of degradation is clearly a strong factor.
Whiffen makes this the foremost reason for the practice. The Indian,
he says, has very definite notions as to the inferiority of the brute
creation. To resemble animals in any way is regarded as degrading;
and this, he regards as the reason for the widespread South American
custom of removing from the body all hair except from the scalp, and
again for the disgrace attendant upon the birth of twins. But animals
are slaughtered as food for men: what disgrace, then to the captured
enemy comparable with being used as food by his captor? Undoubtedly,
the vengeful nature of anthropophagy is a strong factor in maintaining
the custom; from Hans Staden on, writers tell us that while the
captive takes his lot fatalistically his last words are a reminder
to his slayers that his kindred are preparing a like end for them.
Probably the unique and curious South American method of preparing
the heads of slain enemies as trophies, by a process of removing the
bones, shrinking, and decorating, is a practice with the same end--the
degradation of the enemy,--corresponding, of course, to the scalping
and head-taking habits of other American tribes.
[Illustration. PLATE XLII.]
Trophy head prepared by Jivaro Indians, Ecuador, now in the Peabody
Museum. In the preparation of such trophies the bones are carefully
removed, the head shrunken and dried, and frequently, as in this
example, ornamented with brilliant feathers. The custom of preparing
the heads of slain enemies or of sacrificial victims as trophies was
widespread in aboriginal America, North and South, the North American
custom of scalping being probably a late development from this earlier
practice. It is possible that some at least of the masks which appear
upon mythological figures in Nasca and other representations are meant
to betoken trophy heads.
It is to be expected that with the custom of anthropophagy widespread,
it should be constantly reflected in myth. A curious and enlightening
instance is in the Bakairi hero-tale reported by von den Steinen:[193]
A jaguar married a Bakairi maiden; while he was gone ahunting, his
mother, Mero, the mother of all the tiger kind, killed the maiden,
whose twin sons were saved from her body by a Caesarian section. The
girl's body was then served up to the jaguar husband, without his
knowledge. When he discovered the trick--infuriated at the trick and
at having eaten his wife's flesh,--he was about to attack Mero: "I am
thy mother!" she cried, and he desisted. Here we have the whole moral
problem of the house of Pelops primitively adumbrated.
More in the nature of the purely ogreish is the tale related by Couto
de Magalhães,[194] the tale of Ceiuci, the Famished Old Woman (who he
says, is none other than the Pleiades). A young man sat in a tree-rest,
when Ceiuci came to the waters beneath to fish. She saw the youth's
shadow, and cast in her line. He laughed. She looked up. "Descend," she
cried; and when he refused, she sent biting ants after him, compelling
him to drop into the water. Thence she snared him, and went home with
her game. While she was gone for wood to cook her take, her daughter
looked into the catch, and saw the youth, at his request concealing
him. "Show me my game or I will kill you," commanded the ogress. In
company with the youth the maiden takes flight--the "magic flight,"
which figures in many myths, South American and North. As they flee
they drop palm branches which are transformed into animals and these
Ceiuci stops to devour. But in time all kinds of animals have been
formed, and the girl can help the youth no longer. "When you hear a
bird singing _kan kan, kan kan, kan kan_," she says, in leaving him,
"my mother is not far." He goes on till he hears the warning. The
monkeys hide him and Ceiuci passes. He resumes his journey, and again
hears the warning chant. He begs the serpents to hide him; they do so,
and the ogress passes once more. But the serpents now plan to devour
the youth; he hears them laying their plot and calls upon the macauhau,
a snake-eating bird, to help him; and the bird eats the serpents.
Finally, the youth reaches a river, where he is aided by the herons to
cross. From a tree he beholds a house, and going thither he finds an
old woman complaining that her maniocs are being stolen by the agouti.
The man tells her his story. He had started out as a youth; he is now
old and white-haired. The woman recognizes him as her son, and she
takes him in to live with her. Couto de Magalhães sees in this tale an
image of the journey of life with its perils and its loves; the love
of man for woman is the first solace sought, but abiding rest is found
only in mother love. At least the story will bear this interpretation;
nor will it be alone as a South American tale in which the moral
meaning is conscious.
V. SUN, MOON, AND STARS
When the Greeks began to speculate about "the thing the Sophists call
the world," they named it sometimes the Heaven, Ouranos, sometimes
the Realm of Order, Cosmos; and the two terms seemed to them one in
meaning, for the first and striking evidence of law and order in nature
which man discovers is in the regular and recurrent movements of the
heavenly bodies. But it takes a knowledge of number and a sense
of time to be able to truly discern this orderliness of the celestial
sequences; and both of these come most naturally to peoples dwelling
in zones wherein the celestial changes are reflected in seasonal
variations of vegetation and animal life. In the well-nigh seasonless
tropics, and among peoples gifted with no powers of enumeration (for
there are many South American tribes that cannot number the ten
digits), it is but natural to expect that the cycles of the heavens
should seem as lawless as does their own instable environment, and the
stars themselves to be actuated by whims and lusts analogous to their
own.
"I wander, always wander; and when I get where I want to be, I shall
not stop, but still go on...."
This Song of the Turtle, of the Paumari tribes, says Steere,[195]
reflects their own aimless life, wandering from flat to flat of the
ever-shifting river; and it might be taken, too, as the image of the
heavenly motions, as these appear to peoples for whom there is no art
of counting. Some writers, to be sure, have sought to asterize the
greater portion of South American myth, on the general hypothesis that
sun-worship dominates the two Americas; but this is fancy, with little
warrant in the evidence. Sun, moon, and stars, darkness and day, all
find mythic expression; but there is little trace among the wild tribes
of anything approaching ritual devoted to these, or of aught save
mythopoesy in the thought of them.
The most rudimentary level is doubtless represented by the Botocudo,
with whom, says Ehrenreich,[196] _taru_ signifies either sun or moon,
but principally the shining vault of heaven, whether illuminated
by either of these bodies or by lightning; further, the same word,
in suitable phrase, comes to mean both wind and weather, and even
night. In contrast with this we have the extraordinary assurance that
the highly intelligent Passé tribe believes (presumably by their
own induction) that the earth moves and the sun is stationary. The
intermediate, and perhaps most truly mythic stage of speculation is
represented in the Bakairi tales told by von den Steinen, in which the
sun is placed in a pot in the moving heaven; every evening, Evaki,
the wife of the bat who is the lord of darkness, claps to the lid,
concealing the sun while the heaven returns to its former position.
Night and sleep are often personified in South American stones,--as in
the tale of the stork who tried to kill sleep,--and here Evaki, the
mistress of night, is represented as stealing sleep from the eyes of
lizards, and dividing it among all living beings.
A charming allegory of the Amazon and its seasons is recorded by
Barboza Rodriguez. Many years ago the Moon would become the bride of
the Sun; but when they thought to wed, they found that this would
destroy the earth: the burning love of the Sun would consume it, the
tears of the Moon would flood it; and fire and water would mutually
destroy each other, the one extinguished, the other evaporated. Hence,
they separated, going on either side. The Moon wept a day and a night,
so that her tears fell to earth and flowed down to the sea. But the
sea rose up against them, refusing to mingle the Moon's tears with
its waters; and hence it comes that the tears still flow, half a year
outward, half a year inward. Myths of the Pleiades are known to the
Indians throughout Brazil, who regard the first appearance of this
constellation in the firmament as the sign of renewing life, after the
dry season,--"Mother of the Thirsty" is one interpretation of its name.
One myth tells of an earthly hunter who pierced the sky with arrows
and climbed to heaven in quest of his beloved. Being athirst he asked
water of the Pleiades. She gave it him, saying: "Now thou hast drunk
water, thou shalt see whence I come and whither I go. One month long
I disappear and the following month I shine again to the measure of
my appointed time. All that beholds me is renewed." Teschauer credits
many Brazilian Indians with an extensive knowledge of the stars--their
course, ascension, the time of their appearance and disappearance,
and the changes of the year that correspond, but this seems somewhat
exaggerated in view of the limited amount of the lore cited in its
support,--legends of the Pleiades and Canopus already mentioned, and
in addition only Orion, Venus, and Sirius. Of course the Milky Way
is observed, and as in North America it is regarded as the pathway
of souls. So, in the odd Taulipang legend given by Koch-Grünberg,
the Moon, banished from its house by a magician, reflects: "Shall I
become a tapir, a wild-pig, a beast of the chase, a bird? All these
are eaten! I will ascend to the sky! It is better there than here; I
will go there, from thence to light my brothers below." So with his two
daughters he ascended the skies, and the first daughter he sent to a
heaven above the first heaven, and the second to a third heaven; but he
himself remained in the first heaven. "I will remain here," he said,
"to shine upon my brothers below. But ye shall illuminate the Way for
the people who die, that the soul shall not remain in darkness!"
On an analogous theme but in a vein that is indeed grim is the
Cherentes star legend reported by de Oliveira.[197] The sun is the
supreme object of worship in this tribe, while the moon and the stars,
especially the Pleiades, are his cult companions. In the festival of
the dead there is a high pole up which the souls of the shamans are
supposed to climb to hold intercourse with kinsfolk who are with the
heavenly spheres; and it is this pole and the beliefs which attach
to it that is, doubtless, the subject of the myth. The tale is of
a young man who, as he gazed up at the stars, was attracted by the
exceptional beauty of one of them: "What a pity that I cannot shut you
up in my gourd to admire you to my heart's content!" he cried; and
when sleep came, he dreamed of the star. He awoke suddenly, amazed to
find standing beside him a young girl with shining eyes: "I am the
bright star you wished to keep in your gourd," she said; and at her
insistence he put her into the gourd, whence he could see her beautiful
eyes gazing upward. After this the young man had no rest, for he was
filled with apprehension because of his supermundane guest; only at
night the star would come from her hiding-place and the young man
would feast his eyes on her beauty. But one day the star asked the
young man to go hunting, and at a palm-tree she required that he climb
and gather for her a cluster of fruit; as he did so, she leaped upon
the tree and struck it with a wand, and immediately it grew until it
touched the sky, whereto she tied it by its thick leaves and they both
jumped into the sky-world. The youth found himself in the midst of a
desolate field, and the star, commanding him not to stir, went in quest
of food. Presently he seemed to hear the sound of festivity, songs and
dances, but the star, returning, bade him above all not to go to see
the dancing. Nevertheless, when she was gone again, the youth could not
repress his curiosity and he went toward the sound.... "What he saw was
fearful! It was a new sort of dance of the dead! A crowd of skeletons
whirled around, weird and shapeless, their putrid flesh hanging from
their bones and their eyes dried up in their sunken orbits. The air was
heavy with their foul odour." The young man ran away in horror. On his
way he met the star who blamed him for his disobedience and made him
take a bath to cleanse him of the pollution. But he could no longer
endure the sky-world, but ran to the spot where the leaves were tied
to the sky and jumped on to the palm-tree, which immediately began to
shrink back toward the earth: "You run away in vain, you shall soon
return," the star called after him; and so indeed it was, for he had
barely time to tell his kindred of his adventure before he died. And
"thus it was known among the Indians that no heaven of delight awaits
them above, even though the stars shine and charm us."
The uniting of heaven and earth by a tree or rock which grows from
the lower to the upper world is found in many forms, and is usually
associated with cosmogonic myths (true creation stories are not
common in Brazil). Such a story is the Mundurucu tale, reported by
Teschauer,[198] which begins with a chaotic darkness from which
came two men, Karusakahiby, and his son, Rairu. Rairu stumbled on
a bowl-shaped stone; the father commanded him to carry it; he put
it upon his head, and immediately it began to grow. It grew until
it formed the heavens, wherein the sun appeared and began to shine.
Rairu, recognizing his father as the heaven-maker, knelt before him;
but Karu was angry because the son knew more than did he. Rairu was
compelled to hide in the earth. The father found him and was about to
strike him, but Rairu said: "Strike me not, for in the hollow of the
earth I have found people, who will come forth and labour for us." So
the First People were allowed to issue forth, and were separated into
their tribes and kinds according to colour and beauty. The lazy ones
were transformed into birds, bats, pigs, and butterflies. A somewhat
similar Kaduveo genesis, narrated by Frič, tells how the various tribes
of men were led from the underground world and successively assigned
their several possessions; last of all came the Kaduveo, but there were
no more possessions to distribute; accordingly to them was assigned the
right to war upon the other Indians and to steal their lands, wives,
and children.
The Mundurucu genesis opens: "In the beginning the world lay in
darkness." In an opposite and indeed very unusual way begins the
cosmogonic myth recorded by Couto de Magalhães:[199] "In the beginning
there-was no night; the day was unbroken. Night slept at the bottom of
the waters. There were no animals, but all things could speak." It is
said, proceeds the tale, that at this time the daughter of the Great
Serpent married a youth who had three faithful servants. One day he
said to these servants: "Begone! My wife desires no longer to lie with
me." The servants departed, and the husband called upon his wife to lie
with him. She replied: "It is not yet night." He answered: "There is no
night; day is without end." She: "My father owns the night. If you wish
to lie with me, seek it at the river's source." So he called his three
servants, and the wife dispatched them to secure a nut of the tucuma (a
palm of bright orange colour, important to the Indians as a food and
industrial plant). When they reached the Great Serpent he gave them
the nut, tightly sealed: "Take it. Depart. But if you open it, you are
lost." They set out in their canoe, but presently heard from within
the nut: "_Ten ten ten, ten ten ten_." It was the noise of the insects
of the night. "What is this noise? Let us see," said one. The leader
answered: "No: we will be lost. Make haste." But the noise continued
and finally all drew together in the canoe, and with fire melted the
sealing of the fruit. The imprisoned night streamed forth! The leader
cried: "We are lost! Our mistress already knows that we have freed
the night!" At the same time the mistress, in her house, said to her
husband: "They have loosed the night. Let us await the day." Then all
things in the forests metamorphosed themselves into animals and birds;
all things in the waters became water-fowl and fishes; and even the
fisherman in his canoe was transformed into a duck, his head into the
duck's head, his paddle into its web feet, his boat into its body. When
the daughter of the Great Serpent saw Venus rise, she said: "The dawn
is come. I shall divide day from night." Then she unravelled a thread,
saying: "Thou shalt be cubuju [a kind of pheasant]; thou shalt sing as
dawn breaks." She whitened its head and reddened its feathers, saying:
"Thou shalt sing always at dawn of day." Then she unravelled another
thread, saying: "Thou shalt be inambu" [a perdrix that sings at certain
hours of the night]; and powdering it with cinders: "Thou shalt sing at
eve, at midnight, and at early morn." From that time forth the birds
sang at the time appropriate to them, in day or night. But when the
three servants returned, their mistress said to them: "Ye have been
unfaithful. Ye have loosed the night. Ye have caused the loss of all.
For this ye shall become monkeys, and swing among the branches for all
time."
VI. FIRE, FLOOD, AND TRANSFORMATIONS
Purchas's translation of Cardim begins:[200] "It seemeth that this
people had no knowledge of the beginning and creation of the world, but
of the deluge it seemeth they have some notice: but as they have no
writings nor characters such notice is obscure and confused; for they
say that the waters drowned all men, and that one only escaped upon a
Janipata with a sister of his that was with child and that from these
two they have their beginning and from thence began their multiplying
and increase."
This is a fair characterization of the general cosmogonical ideas of
the South American wild tribes. There is seldom any notion of creation;
there is universally, it would seem, some legend of a cataclysm,
or series of them, fire and flood, offering such general analogies
to the Noachian story as naturally to suggest to men unacquainted
with comparative mythology the inference that the tale of Noah was
indeed the source of all. Following the deluge or conflagration
there is a series of incidents which might be regarded as dispersal
stories,--tales of transformations and migrations by means of which
the tribes of animals and men came to assume their present form. Very
generally, too, the Transformer-Heroes are the divine pair, sometimes
father and son, but commonly twin brothers, who give the animals their
lasting forms, instruct men in the arts, and after Herculean labors
depart, the one to become lord of the east and the day, the other lord
of the west and the night, the one lord of life, the other lord of
death and the ghost-world. It is not unnatural to see in this hero pair
the sun and the moon, as some authorities do, though it would surely be
a mistake to read into the Indian's thought the simple identification
which such a statement implies: a tale is first of all a tale, with the
primitive man; and if it have an allegorical meaning this is rarely one
which his language can express in other terms than the tale itself.
One of the best known of the South American deluge stories is the
Caingang legend[201] which the native narrator had heard "from the
mother of the mother of his mother, who had heard it in her day from
her ancient progenitors." The story is the common one of people fleeing
before the flood to a hill and clinging to the branches of a tree while
they await the subsidence of the waters,--an incident of a kind which
may be common enough in flood seasons, and which might be taken as a
mere reflection of ordinary experience but for the fact of the series
of transformations which follow the return to dry land; and these
include not only the formation of the animal kinds, but the gift of
song from a singing gourd and a curious process of divination, taught
by the ant-eater, by means of which the sex of children is foretold.
The flood is only one incident in a much more comprehensive cycle of
events, assembled variously by various peoples, but having such a
family likeness that one may without impropriety regard the group as
the tropical American Genesis. Of this cycle the fullest versions are
those of the Yuracare, as reported by d'Orbigny, and of the Bakairi, as
reported by von den Steinen.[202]
In the Bakairi tale the action begins in the sky-world. A certain
hunter encountered Oka, the jaguar, and agreed to make wives for Oka if
the latter would spare him. He made two wives out of wood, blowing upon
them. One of these wives swallowed two finger-bones, and became with
child. Mero, the mother of Oka and of the jaguar kind, slew the woman,
but Kuara, the brother of Oka, performed the Caesarian operation and
saved the twins, who were within her body. These twins were the heroes,
Keri and Kame. To avenge their mother they started a conflagration
which destroyed Mero, themselves hiding in a burrow in the earth. Kame
came forth too soon and was burned, but Keri blew upon his ashes and
restored him to life. Keri in his turn was burned and restored by Kame.
First, in their resurrected lives did these two assume human form.
Now begins the cycle of their labours. They stole the sun and the moon
from the red and the white vultures, and gave order to their way in
the heavens, keeping them in pots, coverable, when the light of these
bodies should be concealed: sun, moon, and ruddy dawn were all regarded
as made of feathers. Next, heaven and earth, which were as yet close
together, were separated. Keri said to the heavens: "Thou shalt not
remain here. My people are dying. I wish not that my people die." The
heavens answered: "I will remain here!" "We shall exchange places,"
said Keri; whereupon he came to earth and the sky rose to where it
now is. The theft of fire from the fox, who kept it in his eye; the
stealing of water from the Great Serpent, with the formation of rivers;
the swallowing of Kame by a water monster, and his revivescence by
Keri; the institution of the arts of house-building, fishery, dancing;
and the separation of human kinds;--all these are incidents leading
up to the final departure of Keri and Kame, who at the last ascend a
hill, and go thence on their separate ways. "Whither are they gone? Who
knows? Our ancestors knew not whither they went. Today no one knows
where they are."
The Bakairi dwell in the central regions of Brazil; the Yuracare are
across the continent, near the base of the Andes. From them d'Orbigny
obtained a version of the same cosmogony, but fuller and with more
incidents. The world began with sombre forests, inhabited by the
Yuracare. Then came Sararuma and burned the whole country. One man
only escaped, he having constructed an underground refuge. After the
conflagration he was wandering sadly through the ruined world when he
met Sararuma. "Although I am the cause of this ill, yet I have pity on
you," said the latter, and he gave him a handful of seeds from whose
planting sprang, as by magic, a magnificent forest. A wife appeared,
as it were _ex nihilo_, and bore sons and a daughter to this man.
One day the maiden encountered a beautiful tree with purple flowers,
called Ulé. Were it but a man, how she would love it! And she painted
and adorned the tree in her devotion, with sighs and hopes,--hopes
that were not in vain, for the tree became a beautiful youth. Though
at first she had to bind him to keep him from wandering away, the two
became happy spouses. But one day Ulé, hunting with his brothers, was
slain by a jaguar. His bride, in her grief like Isis, gathered together
the morsels of his torn body. Again, her love was rewarded and Ulé
was restored to life, but as they journeyed he glanced in a pool, saw
a disfigured face, where a bit of flesh had not been recovered, and
despite the bride's tears took his departure, telling her not to look
behind, no matter what noise she heard. But she was startled into doing
this, became lost, and wandered into a jaguar's lair. The mother of the
jaguars took pity upon her, but her four sons were for killing her. To
test her obedience they commanded her to eat the poisonous ants that
infested their bodies; she deceived three of them by substituting seeds
for the ants, which she cast to the ground; but the fourth had eyes in
the back of his head, detected the ruse and killed her. From her body
was torn the child which she was carrying, Tiri, who was raised in
secret by the jaguar mother.
When Tiri was grown he one day wounded a paca, which said: "You live
in peace with the murderers of your mother, but me, who have done you
no harm, you wish to kill." Tiri demanded the meaning of this, and the
paca told him the tale. Tiri then lay in wait for the jaguar brothers,
slaying the first three with arrows, but the jaguar with eyes in the
back of his head, climbed into a tree, calling upon the trees, the
sun, stars, and moon to save him. The moon snatched him up, and since
that time he can be seen upon her bosom, while all jaguars love the
night. Tiri, who was the master of all nature, taught cultivation to
his foster-mother, who now had no sons to hunt for her. He longed
for a companion, and created Caru, to be his brother, from his own
finger-nail; and the two lived in great amity, performing many deeds.
Once, invited to a feast, they spilled a vase of liquor which flooded
the whole earth and drowned Caru; but when the waters were subsided,
Tiri found his brother's bones and revived him. The brothers then
married birds, by whom they had children. The son of Caru died and was
buried. Tiri then told Caru at the end of a certain time to go seek
his son, who would be revived, but to be careful not to eat him. Caru,
finding a manioc plant on the grave, ate of it. Immediately a great
noise was heard, and Tiri said: "Caru has disobeyed and eaten his son;
in punishment he and all men shall be mortal, and subject to all toils
and all sufferings."
In following adventures the usual transformations take place, and
mankind, in their tribes, are led forth from a great rock, Tiri saying
to them: "Ye must divide and people all the earth, and that ye shall
do so I create discord and make you enemies of one another." Thus
arose the hostility of tribes. Tiri now decided to depart, and he sent
birds in the several directions to discover in which the earth extends
farthest. Those sent to the east and the north speedily returned, but
the bird sent toward the setting sun was gone a long time, and when
at last it returned it brought with it beautiful feathers. So Tiri
departed into the West, and disappeared.