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.