The Bororos believed that the sky vault, or heaven, formed part of the earth, and was inhabited. They proved this by saying that the vulture could be seen flying higher and higher until it disappeared. It went to perch and rest upon trees in heaven. The Milky Way in the sky—the kuyedje è 'redduddo (literally translated "stars they cinders")—consisted for them merely of the flying cinders from the burning stars.
The sun, they stated, was made up entirely of dead barih, or medicine-men, who rose daily with red-hot irons before their faces. The barihs prowled about the earth at night, and went to the east in the morning on their return to the sun. The hot irons held by the barihs were merely held in order to warm the people on earth. At sunset the orb of day "came down to the water" beyond the horizon, and from there marched back to the east. The Bororos maintained that the heavy and regular footsteps of the sun walking across the earth at night could be heard plainly.
Bororo Girls.
Bororo Girls (side view).
The moon, which was masculine to the Bororos, was the brother of the sun, and was similarly the home of barihs of minor importance.
The legends of the Bororos were generally long and somewhat confused. They were the outcome of extremely imaginative and extraordinarily retentive minds. Their imagination frequently ran away with them, so that it was not always easy to transcribe the legends so as to render them intelligible to the average reader, unaccustomed to the peculiar way of thinking and reasoning of savages. Yet there was generally a certain amount of humorous vraisemblance in their most impossible stories. Their morals, it should be remembered, were not quite the same as ours. There were frequently interminable descriptive details which one could on no account reproduce in print, and without them much of the point of the legends would be lost. So that, with the confusion and disorder of ideas of the Bororos, their peculiar ways of expression, and the mutilation necessary so as not to shock the public, the legends were hardly worth reproducing. Still, I shall give here one or two of the more interesting legends, which can be reproduced almost in their entirety.