I. LANDS AND PEOPLES
Among earth's great continental bodies South America is second only to Australia in isolation. This is true not only geographically, but also in regard to flora and fauna, and in respect of its human aborigines and their cultures. To be sure, within itself the continent shows a diversity as wide, perhaps, as that of any; and certainly no continent affords a sharper contrast both of environment and of culture than is that of the Andes and the civilized Andeans to the tropical forests with their hordes of unqualified savages. There are, moreover, streams of influence reaching from the southern toward the northern America—the one, by way of the Isthmus, tenuously extending the bond of civilization in the direction of the cultured nations of Central America and Mexico; the other carrying northward the savagery of the tropics by the thin line of the Lesser Antilles; and it is, of course, possible that this double movement, under way in Columbian days, was the retroaction of influences that had at one time moved in the contrary direction. Yet, on the whole, South America has its own distinct character, whether of savagery or of civilization, showing little certain evidence of recent influence from other parts of the globe. Au fond the cultural traits—implements, social organization, ideas—are of the types common to mankind at similar levels; but their special developments have a distinctly South American character, so that, whether we compare Inca with Aztec, or Amazonian with Mississippian, we perceive without hesitancy the continental idiosyncracy of each. It is certain that South America has been inhabited from remote times; it is certain, too, that her aboriginal civilizations are ancient, reckoned even by the Old World scale. A daring hypothesis would make this continent an early, and perhaps the first home of the human species—a theory that would not implausibly solve certain difficulties, assuming that the differences which mark aboriginal North from aboriginal South America are due to the fact that the former continent was the meeting-place and confluence of two streams—a vastly ancient, but continuous, northward flow from the south, turned and coloured by a thinner and later wash of Asiatic sources.[154]
The peoples of South America are grouped by d'Orbigny,[155] as result of his ethnic studies of l'homme américain made during the expedition of 1826-33, into three great divisions, or races: the Ando-Peruvian, comprising all the peoples of the west coast as far as Tierra del Fuego; the Pampean, including the tribes of the open countries of the south; and the Brasilio-Guaranian, composed of the stocks of those tropical forests which form the great body of the South American continent. With modifications this threefold grouping of the South American aborigines has been maintained by later ethnologists. One of the most recent studies in this field (W. Schmidt, "Kulturkreise und Kulturschichten in Südamerika," in ZE xlv [1913]), while still maintaining the triple classification, nevertheless shows that the different groups have mingled and intermingled in confusing complexity, following successive cycles of cultural influence. Schmidt's division is primarily on the basis of cultural traits, with reference to which he distinguishes three primary groups: (1) Peoples of the "collective grade," who live by hunting, fishing, and the gathering of plants, with the few exceptions of tribes that have learned some agriculture from neighbours of a higher culture. In this group are the Gez, or Botocudo, and the Puri-Coroados stocks of the east and south-east of Brazil; the stocks of the Gran Chaco, the Pampas, and Tierra del Fuego; while the Araucanians and certain tribes of the eastern cordilleras of the Andes are also placed in this class. (2) Groups of peoples of the Hackbaustufe, mostly practicing agriculture and marked by a general advance in the arts, as well as by the presence of a well-defined patriarchy and evidences of totemism in their social organization. In this group are included the great South American linguistic stocks—the Cariban, Arawakan, and Tupi-Guaranian, inhabiting the forests and semi-steppes of the regions drained by the Orinoco and Amazon and their tributaries, as well as the tribes of the north-east coast of the continent. (3) Groups of the cultured peoples of the Andes—Chibcha, Incaic, and Calchaqui.
The general arrangement of these three divisions follows the contour of the continent. The narrow mountain ridge of the west coast is the seat of the civilized peoples; the home of the lowest culture is the east coast, extending in a broad band of territory from the highlands of the Brazilian provinces of Pernambuco and Bahia south-westward to the Chilean Andes and Patagonia; between these two, occupying the whole centre of the continent, with a broad base along the northern coast and narrowing wedge-like to the south, is the region of the intermediate culture group.
Most of what is known of the mythology of South American peoples comes from tribes and nations of the second and third groups—from the Andeans whose myths have been sketched in preceding chapters, and from the peoples of the tropic forests. The region inhabited by the latter group is too vast to be treated as a simple unit; nor is there, in the chaotic intermixture of tongues and tribes, any clear ethnic demarcation of ideas. In default of other principle, it is appropriate and expedient, therefore, to follow the natural division of the territory into the geographical regions broadly determined by the great river-systems that traverse the continent. These are three: in the north the Orinoco, with its tributaries, draining the region bounded on the west by the Colombian plateau and the Llanos of the Orinoco, and on the south by the Guiana Highlands; in the centre the Amazon, the world's greatest river, the mouth of which is crossed by the Equator, while the stream itself closely follows the equatorial line straight across the continent to the Andes, though its great tributaries drain the central continent, many degrees to the south; and in the south the Rio de la Plata, formed by the confluence of the Paraná and Uruguay, and receiving the waters of the territories extending from El Gran Chaco to the Pampas, beyond which the Patagonian plains and Chilean Andes taper southward to the Horn. In general, the Orinoco region is the home of the Carib and Arawak tribes; the Amazonian region is the seat and centre of the Tupi-Guaranians; while the region extending from the Rio de la Plata to the Horn is the aboriginal abode of various peoples, mostly of inferior culture. It should be borne in mind, however, that the simplicity of this plan is largely factitious. Linguistically, aboriginal South America is even more complex than North America (at least above Mexico); and the whole central region is a mélange of verbally unrelated stocks, of which, for the continent as a whole, Chamberlain's incomplete list gives no less than eighty-three.[156]
II. SPIRITS AND SHAMANS
"The aborigines of Guiana," writes Brett,[157] "in their naturally wild and untaught condition, have had a confused idea of the existence of one good and supreme Being, and of many inferior spirits, who are supposed to be of various kinds, but generally of malignant character. The Good Spirit they regard as the Creator of all, and, as far as we could learn, they believe Him to be immortal and invisible, omnipotent and omniscient. But notwithstanding this, we have never discovered any trace of religious worship or adoration paid to Him by any tribe while in its natural condition. They consider Him as a Being too high to notice them; and, not knowing Him as a God that heareth prayer, they concern themselves but little about Him." In another passage the same writer states that the natives of Guiana "all maintain the Invisibility of the Eternal Father. In their traditionary legends they never confound Him—the Creator,—the 'Ancient of Heaven'—with the mythical personages of what, for want of a better term, we must call their heroic age; and though sorcerers claim familiarity with, and power to control, the inferior (and malignant) spirits, none would ever pretend to hold intercourse with Him, or that it were possible for mortal man to behold Him." A missionary to the same region, Fray Ruiz Blanco,[158] earlier by some two hundred years, says of the religion of these aborigines that, "The false rites and diableries with which the multitude are readily duped are innumerable ... briefly ... there is the seated fact that all are idolaters, and there is the particular fact that all abhor and greatly fear the devil, whom they call Iboroquiamio."
Minds of a scientific stamp see the matter somewhat differently. "The natives of the Orinoco," Humboldt declares,[159] "know no other worship than that of the powers of nature; like the ancient Germans they deify the mysterious object which excites their simple admiration (deorum nominibus appellant secretum illud, quod sola reverentia vident)." From the point of view of an ethnologist of the school of Tylor, im Thurn describes the religion of the Indians of Guiana: Having no belief in a hierarchy of spirits, they can have, he says, "none in any such beings as in higher religions are called gods.... It is true that various words have been found in all, or nearly all, the languages, not only of Guiana, but also of the whole world, which have been supposed to be the names of a great spirit, supreme being, or god"; nevertheless, he concludes, "the conception of a God is not only totally foreign to Indian habits of thought, but belongs to a much higher stage of intellectual development than any attained by them."