The Mythology of All Races, Vol. 11: Latin-American

by Hartley Burr Alexander

Not the quest of the Golden Fleece itself and the adventures of the Argonauts with clashing rocks and Amazonian women are so filled with extravagance and peril as is the search for El Dorado.[116] The legend of the Gilded Man and of his treasure city sprang from the soil of the New World in the very dawn of its discovery—whether wholly in the imaginations of conquistadores dazzled with dreams of gold, or partly from some custom, tale, or myth of the American Indians it is now impossible to say. In its earlier form it told of a priest, or king, or priest-king, who once a year smeared his body with oil, powdered himself with gold dust, and in gilded splendour, accompanied by nobles, floated to the centre of a lake, where, as the onlookers from the shore sang and danced, he first made offering of treasure to the waters and then himself leaped in to wash the gold from his body. Later, fostered by the readiness of the aborigines to rid themselves of the plague of white men by means of tales of treasure cities farther on, the story grew into pictures of the golden empire of Omagua, or Manoa, or Paytiti, or Enim, on the shores of a distant lake. Expedition after expedition journeyed in quest of the fabled capital. As early as 1530, Ambros von Alfinger, a German knight, set out from the coast of Venezuela in search of a golden city, chaining his enslaved native carriers to one another by means of neck-rings and cutting off the heads of those who succumbed to fatigue to save the trouble of unlinking them; Alfinger himself was wounded in the neck by an arrow and died of the wound. In 1531 Diego de Ordaz conducted an expedition guided by a lieutenant who claimed to have been entertained in the city of Omoa by El Dorado himself; in 1536-38 George of Spires, afterward governor of Venezuela, made a journey of fifteen hundred miles into the interior; and another German, the red-bearded Nicholas Federman, departed upon the same quest. On the plains of Bogotá in 1539 they met Quesada and Belalcazar, who, coming from the north and from the south respectively, had subdued the Chibcha realm. Hernan Perez de Quesada, brother of the conqueror, led an unlucky expedition, behaving with such cruelty that his death from lightning was regarded as a divine retribution; while the expeditions of the chivalrous Philip von Hutten (1540-41) and of Orellana down the Amazon (1540-41) were followed by others, down to the time of Sir Walter Raleigh's quest in 1595,—all enlarging the geographical knowledge of South America and accumulating fables of cities of gold and nations of warlike women. Of all these adventures, however, the most amazing was the "jornada de Omagua y Dorado" which set out from Peru in 1559 under the leadership of Don Pedro de Ursua, a knight of Navarre. Ursua was a gentleman, worthy of his knighthood, but his company was crowded with cut-throats, of whom he himself was an early victim. Hernando de Guzman made himself master of the mutineers, and renouncing allegiance to the King of Castile, proclaimed himself Prince and King of all Tierra Firme; but he, in turn fell before his tyrant successor, Lope de Aguirre, whose fantastic and blood-thirsty insanity caused half the continent to shudder at his name, which is still remembered in Venezuelan folk-lore, where the phosphorescence of the swamp is called fuego de Aguirre in the belief that under such form the tortured soul of the tyrant wanders abroad.

The true provenance of the story of the Gilded Man (if not of the treasure city) seems certainly to be the region about Bogotá in the realm of the Chibcha. Possibly the myth may refer to the practices of one of the nations conquered by the Muyscan Zipas before the coming of the Spaniards, and legendary even at that time; for as the tale is told, it seems to describe a ceremony in honour of such a water-spirit as we are everywhere told the Colombian nations venerated; and it may actually be that the Gilded Man was himself a sacrifice to or a personation of the deity. Whatever the origin, the legends of El Dorado have their node in the lands of the Chibcha—a circumstance not without its own poetic warrant, for from no other American people have jewelleries of cunningly wrought gold come in more abundance.

PLATE XXVII (A).

Colombian gold work. Ornaments in the forms of human and monstrous beings, doubtless mythological subjects. The originals are in the American Museum of Natural History.

PLATE XXVII (B).

Colombian gold work. The human figure apparently holds a staff or wand and may represent Bochica or similar personage. The originals are in the American Museum of Natural History.

The Zipa of Bogotá, at the period of the conquest, was the most considerable of the native rulers in what is now Colombia, having an empire only less in extent than those of the Peruvian Incas and of the Aztec Kings. He also was a recent lord, engaged at the very time of the coming of the whites in extending his power over neighbouring rulers; it is probable that Guatavita, east of Bogotá had fallen to the Zipa not many decades before the conquest and this Guatavita is supposed to have been the scene of the rite of El Dorado; in any case it had remained a famous shrine. Tunja was another power to the east of Bogotá declining before the rising power of the Zipas, its Zaque (as the Tunjan caciques were called) being saved from the Zipa's forces by the arrival of the Spaniards.

Besides these—the Chibcha proper[117]—there were in Colombia in the sixteenth century other civilized peoples, akin in culture and language, whose chief centres were in the elongated Cauca valley paralleling the Pacific coast. Farthest north were the tribes in the neighbourhood of Antioquia—the Tamahi and Nutabi; south of these, about Cartago, were the most famous of gold-workers, the Quimbaya; while near the borders of what is now Ecuador dwelt the Coconuco and their kindred. All these peoples possessed skill in pottery, metal-working, and weaving; and the inhabitants of the Cauca valley were the most advanced of the Colombians in these arts. Indeed, the case of Peru seems to be in a measure repeated; for the Chibcha surpassed their neighbours in the strength of their military and political organization rather than in their knowledge of the arts. It is even possible that the Chibcha had been driven eastward by the western tribes, for the inhabitants of the Cauca valley possessed traditions of a northern origin, claiming to be immigrants; while the Chibcha still regarded certain spots in the territories of their western enemies, the Muzo, as sacred. Little is known of the mythic systems of any of these peoples save the Chibcha. The Antioquians preserved a deluge-myth (as doubtless did all the other Colombians); and they recognized a creator-god, Abirá, a spirit of evil, Canicubá, and a goddess, Dabeciba, who was the same as Dabaiba, the Darien Mother of the Creator. Cieza de León says[118] that the Antioquians "carve the likeness of a devil, very fierce and in human form, with other images and figures of cats which they worship; when they require water or sunshine for their crops, they seek aid from these idols." Of the Quimbaya Cieza tells how there appeared to a group of women making salt beside a spring the apparition of a disembowelled man who prophesied a pestilence that soon came. "Many women and boys affirmed that they saw the dead with their own eyes walking again. These people well understand that there is something in man besides the mortal body, though they do not hold that it is a soul, but rather some kind of transfiguration." The Sun, the Moon, and the Rainbow were important divinities with all these tribes, and they made offerings of gold and jewels and children to water-spirits in rivers and in springs. Human sacrifice was probably universal, and too many of the Indians, as Cieza puts it, "not content with natural food, turned their bellies into tombs of their neighbours."