PLATE XLI.
PLATE XLI.
Dance or ceremonial masks of Brazilian Indians, now in the Peabody Museum.
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 maskisfor 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 becomesmáskara-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."
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, calledtammaraka, with which they danced; each man had his own, but once a year thepaygis, 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 afilha 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 theeast 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 theAbove, and in their further belief in multitudes of dangerous spirit neighbours sharing with them the Here.
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 iscorrect, 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 beingused 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.
PLATE XLII.
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 willkill 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 singingkan 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.
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 heavenlybodies. 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...."
"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]tarusignifies 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, andperhaps 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 apprehensionbecause 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 andindustrial 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."
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 humanform. 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 wereex 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 paintedand 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 anddrowned 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.
The Rio de la Plata is the third of the great river systems which drain the South American continent. It combines the waters of the Uruguay, draining the hilly region of southern Brazil, with those of the Paraná, which through its numerous tributaries taps the heart of the south central portion of the continent. The Paraná and its continuation, the Paraguay, flowing almost due south from the centre of the continent, form a kind of axis, dividing the hilly lands on the east from the great woodland plains known as the Chaco, stretching westward to the Andes, from whose age-worn detritus they were doubtless formed. The northern boundary of the Chaco is in the neighbourhood of the Tropic of Capricorn; southward the plains extend far into Argentina, narrowing with the encroaching mountains, and finally giving way to the grassy pampas, in the latitude of Buenos Aires. These, in turn, extend southward to the Patagonian plains—geologically one of earth's youngest regions,—of which the terminus is the mountain region meeting the southern straits. Parallel with this stretch of open country, which diminishes in width as the southern latitudes are approached, is the Andean ridge, almost due north and south in sense, scarcely varying the width of the western coastal region which it marks off, but eastward extending in heavier lines of ridges and broader plateaus as the centre of the continent is approached. South of latitude 40º the western coastal region, with the sinking of the Andean range, merges in a long archipelago leading on to Tierra del Fuego andits satellite islands, beyond the Straits of Magellan,—an archipelago which is the far southern counterpart of that reaching along North America from Puget Sound to the Aleutian Isles.
The aboriginal peoples of the region thus described fall into a number of groups of exceptional interest to the ethnologist. In the Chaco, to the north, are to be found, to this day, tribes practically untouched by the influence of civilization—tribes in the state which for untold centuries must have been that of the peoples of central South America. Some of them show signs of having been under the influence of the cultured peoples of the Andean regions, preserving in their fabrics, for example, figured designs strikingly like those of Incaic Peru. It has even been suggested that the region is in no small part peopled by descendants of Indians who in former times fled from the west, first before the armies of the Incas, later before the advance of Spanish power.
This constant pressure, which can in a measure be followed in historic times, has had its effect in pushing southward peoples whose origin must be sought in the central region. Such a people are the Abipone—a group of tribes which owe their especial fame among South American Indians perhaps more to the fact that they were so faithfully pictured by Father Dobrizhoffer, during the period in which they were gathered in missions, than to their own qualities, striking as these are. In any case, the Abipone, who in the eighteenth century had become an equestrian people of the open country, had, according to their own tradition, moved southward out of the forests, bearing with them many of the traits still to be found among the tribes of the Chaco.
The Calchaqui civilization, of the Andean region just north of latitude 30º was one of the latest conquests of the Inca power, and represents its southerly extension. The actual dividing line, as recorded by Garcilasso, was the river Rapel, latitude 34º, where, according to the historian, the Inca Tupac Yupanqui was held in his southward advance by the Araucanian(or Aucanian) tribes who formed the population of Chile and west central Argentina. The Araucanians enjoy the proud distinction of being to this day an unconquered people; for they held their own in long and bloody wars with the Spaniards, as before they had held against the aggressive Incas. Further, in their general culture, and in intellectual vigor, they stand at the head of the peoples of southerly South America.
Scarcely less in romantic interest is the group of peoples—the Puelche and Tehuelche tribal stocks—forming the Patagonian race, whose tall stature, exaggerated in the imagination of early discoverers, made of them a race of giants. Like the Pampean tribes they early become horsemen, expert with the bolas; and with no permanent villages and no agriculture, they remain equestrian nomads of the southern plains. The Ona of Tierra del Fuego represent a non-equestrian as they are also a non-canoe-using branch of the Patagonian race. Altogether different are the canoe peoples of the southern archipelago, the Alakaluf and the Yahgan. These have shared with the Australian Blacks, with the Botocudo, and with one or two other groups of human beings, the reputation of representing the lowest grade of human intelligence and attainment. They were long thought to be hopelessly imbruted, though this judgement is being somewhat revised in the face of the achievements of missionary workers among them. Still there are few more striking contrasts in the field of ethnology than is that between the culture of the peoples of the Pacific archipelago of the northern America, with their elaborate society, art, and mythology, and the mentally deficient and culturally destitute savages of the island region of austral America.
In d'Orbigny's classification the Pampean race is divided into three groups. Of these the most northerly is the Moxean, comprising tribes about the headwaters of the Madeira. Nextsouthward is the Chiquitean branch, with their centre on the divide between the headwaters of the Madeira and those of the southward flowing Paraguay and Pilcomayo rivers; hence marking the division of the Amazonian and La Plata systems. Still south of these is the main Pampean branch, its northerly reach being represented by the Toba, Lengua, and other Chaco stocks; its centre by the Mocobi, Abipone, and the Charrua of Uruguay (whom other authorities ally with the Brazilian stocks); its southerly division comprising the Puelche and the Tehuelche, or Patagonians proper. So far as the Pampean branch is concerned, this grouping corresponds with ideas still received.
D'Orbigny gives scant materials as to the mythic beliefs of the Indians of the Pampean tribes, yet some are of more than ordinary interest. Thus, of the Mataguaya, he says[204]that they regard eclipses as due to a great bird, with spread wings, assailing the star eclipsed,—which is in harmony with widespread South American notions; so, for example, in the Chiquitean idea, recorded by Father Fernandez, the eclipsed moon is darkened by its own blood drawn by savage dogs. Still more interesting is the statement, drawn from Guevara'sHistoria del Paraguay, that the Mocobi regard the Southern Cross as the image of a rhea pursued by dogs. This is the very form in which the Great Wain is interpreted in North America; as far as north Greenland it is regarded as a bear or deer pursued by dogs or by hunters. Fragments of a Mocobi cosmic myth are also given: The Sun is a man, the Moon is a woman. Once, long ago, the Sun fell from the sky. The Mocobi raised it and placed it again in the sky, but it fell a second time and burned all the forests. The Mocobi saved themselves by changing themselves into caymans and other amphibians. A man and a woman climbed a tree to save themselves, a flame singed their faces, and they were changed into apes.... This tale is obviously related to the hero cycle of which the Bakairi and Yuracare stories are versions.
But among the Indians of this region it is of the Abipone, neighbours of the Mocobi, that our knowledge is fullest, owing to the classical narrative of Martin Dobrizhoffer[205]who, in the eighteenth century, was for eighteen years a Jesuit missionary in Paraguay. In general Dobrizhoffer's account of the Abipone corresponds so closely with what is now familiar knowledge of Indian ideas—animism, shamanism, necromancy, and in their own region belief in were-jaguars and the like,—that it is valuable rather for verification than interpretation. In the field of religion, the Father is interested in superstitions rather than in myth, of which he gives little. His comments, however, have a quality of personality that imparts an entirely dramatic verve to his narrative of the encounter of the two minds—Jesuit and savage.
"Haec est summa delicti, nolle recognoscere quem ignorare non possit,are the words of Tertullian, in his Apology for the Christians. Theologians agree in denying that any man in possession of his reason can, without a crime, remain ignorant of God for any length of time. This opinion I warmly defended in the University of Cordoba, where I finished the four years' course of theology begun at Gratz in Styria. But what was my astonishment, when on removing from thence to a colony of Abipones, I found that the whole language of these savages does not contain a single word which expresses God or a divinity. To instruct them in religion, it was necessary to borrow the Spanish word for God, and insert into the catechismDios ecnam coagarik,God the creator of things." He goes on to tell how, camped in the open with a party of Indians, the serene sky delighting the eyes with its twinkling stars, he began a conversation with the Cacique Ychoalay: "Do you behold the splendour of the Heaven, with its magnificent arrangement of stars? Who can suppose that all this is produced by chance?... Who can be mad enough to imagine that all these beauties of the Heavens are the effect of chance, and that the revolutions and vicissitudes of the celestial bodies are regulated without thedirection of an omniscient mind? Whom do you believe to be their creator and governor?" "My father," replied Ychoalay, "our grandfathers and great-grandfathers were wont to contemplate the earth alone, solicitous only to see whether the plain afforded grass and water for their horses. They never troubled themselves about what went on in the Heavens, and who was the creator and governor of the stars."
Such incomprehension of things theological seemed to the missionaries to argue a sub-human nature in the Indians, and Dobrizhoffer, after remarking that Paul III was obliged to issue a bull in which he pronounced Indians to be really men, capable of understanding the Catholic faith and of receiving its sacraments, goes on himself to argue that they are in fact intelligent human beings in spite of this incredible density. And then he continues: "I said that the Abipones were commendable for their wit and strength of mind; but ashamed of my too hasty praise, I retract my words and pronounce them fools, idiots, and madmen. Lo! this is the proof of their insanity! They are unacquainted with God, and with the very name of God, yet they affectionately salute the evil spirit, whom they callAharaigichi, orQueevèt, with the title of grandfather,Groaperikie. Him they declare to be their grandfather, and that of the Spaniards, but with this difference, that to the latter he gives gold and silver and fine clothes, but to them he transmits valour." Here the lips of the reader begin to flicker with amusement,—it is easy to see the devil under the mask of strange gods! Father Dobrizhoffer continues: "The Abipones think the Pleiades to be the representation of their grandfather; and as that constellation disappears at certain periods from the sky of South America, upon such occasions, they suppose that their grandfather is sick, and are under a yearly apprehension that he is going to die: but as soon as those seven stars are again visible in the month of May, they welcome their grandfather, as if returned and restored from sickness, with joyful shouts, and the festive sound of pipes and trumpets, congratulatinghim on the recovery of his health. 'What thanks do we owe thee! and art thou returned at last? Ah! thou hast happily recovered!' With such exclamations, expressive of their joy and folly, do they fill the air."
Dobrizhoffer devotes a learned and amusing chapter to "Conjectures why the Abipones take the Evil Spirit for their Grandfather and the Pleiades for the representation of him"; in which, finding no Scriptural explanation, he concludes that the cult came ultimately from Peru (the Peruvian's knowledge of God did not come along with it because "vice is more easily learnt than virtue"). As a matter of fact the Pleiades cult extends throughout Brazil, its seasonal reappearance being the occasion, as Dobrizhoffer narrates, of a great feast of intoxication and joy, a veritable Dionysia. And it is hardly to be doubted that the Abipone, as their own traditions indicate, came from the north, probably from the Chaco. It is to a contemporary missionary, Barbrooke Grubb, who has spent an even longer time in the Chaco than did the Jesuit among the Abipone, that we owe the completer interpretation of the ideas which Dobrizhoffer sketched. The Chaco Indians are as near untouched savages as any people on the globe, so that their beliefs are essentially uncontaminated.
The mythology of the Chaco tribes, says Grubb,[206]is founded on the idea of a Creator, symbolized by the beetle. First, the material universe was made; then the Beetle-Creator sent forth from its hole in the earth a race of First Beings, who for a time ruled all. Afterward the Beetle formed a man and a woman from the clay which it threw up from its hole, the two being joined like the Siamese twins. They were persecuted by the beings who preceded them, whereupon the Beetle separated them and endowed them with the power of reproduction, whence the world was peopled and came to its present state.
Whether or no the First Beings, hostile to man, are to be identified with the Kilyikhama, a class of nature daemones, Grubb does not make clear. He does, however, describenumerous of these daemonic forms,—the white Kilyikhama, heard whistling in his little craft on the swampy waters; the boy Kilyikhama with lights on each side of his head, the thieving Kilyikhama; and most dreaded of all the daemon, immensely tall and extremely thin, with eyes like balls of fire, whose appearance presages instant death. In addition to these daemones, Aphangak, ghosts of men, are intensely feared, and there are ghosts of animals, too, to be dreaded,—though, curiously, none of fish or serpents. The Milky Way is supposed to be the path of the Kilyikhama, some of whom, in the form of large white birds, are believed there to await their opportunity to descend into the bodies of men. A very curious burial custom is also associated with the Galaxy: when a person is laid out (sometimes even before the dying has breathed his last) an incision is made in the side of the body and heated stones are inserted; these stones are supposed to ascend into the Milky Way whence they await their opportunity to fall upon the person (wizard or other) who has caused the death. "Consequently the Indians are very frightened when they see a falling star." Whirlwinds are believed to be the passing of spirits, and the whole realm of the meteorological is full of portents,—the rainbow, oddly enough, conceived as a serpentine monster, being a sign of calamity rather than an arc of hope.
Of the Pleiades Grubb says that they are known by two names—Mounting-in-the-South and Holders-Together. "Their rising is connected with the beginning of spring, and feasts are held at this time, generally of a markedly immoral character." That they call the constellation Aksak, Grandfather, is not, in the missionary's opinion, due to the fact that it is the image or embodiment of the devil (as Dobrizhoffer supposed of the similar Abiponean custom). Aksak is rather a term applied to any person or thing whose nature is not quite understood or with whom power and authority rest: "what is most important of all, they term the creator beetleaksak." Grubb concludes: "In my opinion, the statement of Dobrizhofferthat the Abipones looked upon themselves as descendants, or, it may be, the creation of their 'grandfather the devil,' is nothing more nor less than the widespread tradition that man was created by the beetle, and, therefore, their originator, instead of being a devil, was rather a creating god." Perhaps, after all, Tertullian is right.
The missionary also speaks of "a remarkable theory" held by the Indians, that among the stars there are countries similar to their own, with forests and lakes, which he would explain either as tales of the mirage or as due to "a childlike notion that the sky is solid." The "childlike notion" is, of course, but another instance of a conception that prevails among the native tribes of the two Americas, as far as north Greenland; and along with this notion is that of an underworld to which ghosts descend, which he elsewhere mentions as characteristic of the Chaco,—though his account of their varying ideas as to the habitations of the dead shows well enough that these savage theorists are as uncertain in their location of the abode of shades as was Homer himself.
The Araucanian, or Auca, tribes—of which the Mapuche, Pehuenche, and Huiliche are the more important divisions, while the southerly Chono and Chiloe are remote branches—are the aborigines of the southern Andean region, inhabiting both slopes of the mountains, extending to the sea on the Pacific side and out into the Patagonian plains on the Atlantic side. Of all the extreme austral Indians they represent from pre-Columbian times the highest culture, though it is evident that the process of acculturation was recent when the whites first appeared, resulting from contact with Inca and Calchaqui civilizations. The whole group of Araucanians proper was organized into a confederacy, with four principal divisions, uniting for common defence,—an organization very similarto that of the Iroquois Confederacy in North America, and equally effective; for the Araucanians not only put a stop to the southerly aggressions of the Incas, but they also successfully resisted the Spaniards, establishing for themselves a unique place in the history of American aborigines in contact with the white race. In manner of life the Araucanians were originally little if any in advance of their Patagonian neighbours; but as a result of their contact with the northerly Andean peoples, their own northern branches had acquired, when the Spaniards first came, a rudimentary agriculture, the potter's and the weaver's arts, some skill with gold and silver, and the habit of domesticating the guanaco,—and this culture was gradually extending to the south. As a whole, however, Araucanian culture represents a sharp descent, marked by the boundaries of the Incaic empire.
The romantic history of the Araucanians, and especially their heroic wars with the Spaniards, have naturally attracted to them an unusual measure of historical and anthropological investigation, so the literature is copious. Molina'sHistory, written in the middle of the eighteenth century, is the best-known work in the field, and is, in a sense, the classic exposition of Araucanian institutions, though both for extent and accuracy it has been superseded by later works, pre-eminently those of José Medina and Tomás Guevara.[207]The first volume of the latter's greatHistoria de la Civilización de Araucaniais devoted to "Antropolojía Araucana," and in it is given a summary of the native pantheon.
First of the gods is Pillan, often regarded as the Araucanian equivalent of the Tupan of the forest regions of Brazil, god of thunder and spirit of fire. "This conception represents a survival of the prehistoric idea which considers fire as the life-principle, carried to the point of adoring it as an invisible and personal power ... forces of nature, such as this, being personified in the mind of the barbarian." Pillan, however, while a personal, is also a collective power: caciques at their deathand warriors who fall in battle pass into the category of Pilli, some being converted into volcanic forces, others ascending to the clouds. "From this source," says Guevara, "is due the belief, conserved almost to this time, that a tempest is a battle between their ancestors and their enemies, and the custom of encouraging their own and imprecating the others according to the turn of the battle: if the clouds move toward the south victory pertains to those of their race; if to the north—the country of the Spaniards—they suppose the latter to be victorious."... Inevitably one recalls the bodeful thunder-storm inJulius Caesar,—
"Fierce fiery warriors fought upon the clouds,In ranks and squadrons and right form of war,Which drizzled blood upon the Capitol;The noise of battle hurtled in the air,Horses did neigh, and dying men did groan,And ghosts did shriek and squeal about the streets."
Pillan, as the supreme god of a warlike people, was naturally regarded as the god of war. "They made his habitation," says our author, "in all those parts whence breaks the thunder: on the crest of high mountains, in the clouds, and in the volcanoes, whose eruptions are so often accompanied by electrical phenomena." The deity's name is, as a matter of fact, preserved in the names of various peaks.
Molina[208]states that the word Pillan is derived frompilli, meaning "soul," and that the god has various attributive designations, such as Spirit-of-Heaven (Guenu-pillan), the Great Being, the Thunderer; and along with these, suspiciously European, such epithets as the Creator, the Omnipotent, the Eternal. On the whole, it is not unreasonable to assume that the true aboriginal meaning of the word is "mysterious power" and that the idea itself belongs with the group of conceptions of a semi-pantheistic nature power, of which Wakanda and Manito are the best-known names.
That Pillan stands at the head of a hierarchy of naturepowers is the unanimous testimony of authorities. Molina believes that the government of Pillan is modelled on that of the Araucanian confederacy. He is the great chief of the invisible world, having under him his high-chiefs and under-chiefs to conduct cosmic affairs. As with most primitive folk, the great majority of these lesser deities are considered as malignant, or at least as dangerous, rather than as beneficent powers. The Huecuvu (Guecubu, in Molina) are a group of daemones capable of assuming animal and human forms. The Indians "attribute natural phenomena to the implacable hatred of these agents of Pillan. They sow the fields with caterpillars, weaken animals with disease, quake the earth, and devour the fish in rivers and lakes. The Huecuvu corresponds with great exactness to the idea of demon." Evil also is Epunamun (whom Molina regarded as a war-god, apparently on the strength of the Padre Olivares's statement that he presided at councils of war, where "though they have no confidence in his councils, they frequently follow them, rather than offend through disobedience"). Epunamun is represented as having deformed legs, and he probably belongs to that extraordinary group of South American monster-bogeys having feet reversed or knees that bend backward. The Cherruve are the spirits or senders of shooting-stars and comets, figured (quite to the taste of the Mediaeval European) as man-headed serpents. Similar is the Ihuaivilu, a seven-headed fire-monster, inhabiting volcanic neighbourhoods. Meulen appears to be anything but the benevolent deity that Molina deemed it; he is the spirit of the whirlwind, disappearing in the ground in the form of a lizard when the whirlwind is dissipated; in modern folklore he appears as El Destolanado, devouring all children who cross his path.
The category of demonic beings is by no means exhausted with these wind and fire powers. The old Chilean mythic lore is filled with composite and metamorphosing beast-bogeys and witch-beings, many of which have been handed on to the modernpeasantry; so that it is now often impossible to tell what elements are native and what communicated. Many still bear native names. Perimontum is a phantom appearing from the other world to announce some extraordinary event. The Am is the ghost of a murdered man; the Alhue is a mischievous sprite whose sport is to frighten men. Colocolo is a small, invisible or subterranean animal or bird, whose cry,colo colo!is sometimes heard; anyone drinking its saliva will die. Negúruvilu, or Guirivilo, is a cat-like monster armed with a claw-pointed tail; it lives in the depths of the waters, whence it sallies forth to kill men and animals, assuming a serpentine form as it envelops them. There are numerous other water-monsters, some marine, some amphibians, their most various forms being naturally found among the Chiletes of the southern archipelago. El Caleuche, the witch-boat, is interesting for the fact that here, in the far Pacific south, it represents what might almost be called an outcropping of the similar conceptions found among the Eskimo and the pelagic tribes of the North-West Coast. The witch-boat is seen at night, illuminated, and it carries fishermen down to the treasure-houses at the bottom of the sea. Another monster of this region is Camahueto, capable of wrecking large boats; while Cuero, known to the Araucanians as Trelquehuecuve, is a sort of huge octopus, whose arms end in claws and whose ears are covered with eyes; it has great powers of dilation and contraction, and seizes and slays all that fall within its reach; when it goes ashore to sun itself and wishes to return to its element, it raises a gale which pushes it into the water. Huaillepeñ, or Guallipén, is in the form of a calf-headed sheep, with deformed legs; it issues from streams and pools on misty mornings and frightens pregnant women, causing their children to be born deformed. The Imbunche are monsters into which babes stolen by witches have been transformed; the Trauco is an old witch appearing in the form of a child and having the habits of an incubus; the Pihuicheñ, or Piguchén, is a vampire-like serpent that can transform itselfinto a frog, a blood-sucker and death-bringer, while the Chonchoñ, a vampire having the form of a human head whose huge ears serve as wings for its nocturnal flights, is reminiscent of the travelling heads which form so important a group of bogeys on the North American continent.