Chapter IX: The Tropical Forests: the Amazon and Brazil (1)

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]

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.

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.

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...."