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

by Hartley Burr Alexander

D'Orbigny gives scant materials as to the mythic beliefs of the Indians of the Pampean tribes, yet some are of more than ordinary interest. Thus, of the Mataguaya, he says[204] that they regard eclipses as due to a great bird, with spread wings, assailing the star eclipsed,—which is in harmony with widespread South American notions; so, for example, in the Chiquitean idea, recorded by Father Fernandez, the eclipsed moon is darkened by its own blood drawn by savage dogs. Still more interesting is the statement, drawn from Guevara's Historia del Paraguay, that the Mocobi regard the Southern Cross as the image of a rhea pursued by dogs. This is the very form in which the Great Wain is interpreted in North America; as far as north Greenland it is regarded as a bear or deer pursued by dogs or by hunters. Fragments of a Mocobi cosmic myth are also given: The Sun is a man, the Moon is a woman. Once, long ago, the Sun fell from the sky. The Mocobi raised it and placed it again in the sky, but it fell a second time and burned all the forests. The Mocobi saved themselves by changing themselves into caymans and other amphibians. A man and a woman climbed a tree to save themselves, a flame singed their faces, and they were changed into apes.... This tale is obviously related to the hero cycle of which the Bakairi and Yuracare stories are versions.

But among the Indians of this region it is of the Abipone, neighbours of the Mocobi, that our knowledge is fullest, owing to the classical narrative of Martin Dobrizhoffer[205] who, in the eighteenth century, was for eighteen years a Jesuit missionary in Paraguay. In general Dobrizhoffer's account of the Abipone corresponds so closely with what is now familiar knowledge of Indian ideas—animism, shamanism, necromancy, and in their own region belief in were-jaguars and the like,—that it is valuable rather for verification than interpretation. In the field of religion, the Father is interested in superstitions rather than in myth, of which he gives little. His comments, however, have a quality of personality that imparts an entirely dramatic verve to his narrative of the encounter of the two minds—Jesuit and savage.

"Haec est summa delicti, nolle recognoscere quem ignorare non possit, are the words of Tertullian, in his Apology for the Christians. Theologians agree in denying that any man in possession of his reason can, without a crime, remain ignorant of God for any length of time. This opinion I warmly defended in the University of Cordoba, where I finished the four years' course of theology begun at Gratz in Styria. But what was my astonishment, when on removing from thence to a colony of Abipones, I found that the whole language of these savages does not contain a single word which expresses God or a divinity. To instruct them in religion, it was necessary to borrow the Spanish word for God, and insert into the catechism Dios ecnam coagarik, God the creator of things." He goes on to tell how, camped in the open with a party of Indians, the serene sky delighting the eyes with its twinkling stars, he began a conversation with the Cacique Ychoalay: "Do you behold the splendour of the Heaven, with its magnificent arrangement of stars? Who can suppose that all this is produced by chance?... Who can be mad enough to imagine that all these beauties of the Heavens are the effect of chance, and that the revolutions and vicissitudes of the celestial bodies are regulated without the direction of an omniscient mind? Whom do you believe to be their creator and governor?" "My father," replied Ychoalay, "our grandfathers and great-grandfathers were wont to contemplate the earth alone, solicitous only to see whether the plain afforded grass and water for their horses. They never troubled themselves about what went on in the Heavens, and who was the creator and governor of the stars."

Such incomprehension of things theological seemed to the missionaries to argue a sub-human nature in the Indians, and Dobrizhoffer, after remarking that Paul III was obliged to issue a bull in which he pronounced Indians to be really men, capable of understanding the Catholic faith and of receiving its sacraments, goes on himself to argue that they are in fact intelligent human beings in spite of this incredible density. And then he continues: "I said that the Abipones were commendable for their wit and strength of mind; but ashamed of my too hasty praise, I retract my words and pronounce them fools, idiots, and madmen. Lo! this is the proof of their insanity! They are unacquainted with God, and with the very name of God, yet they affectionately salute the evil spirit, whom they call Aharaigichi, or Queevèt, with the title of grandfather, Groaperikie. Him they declare to be their grandfather, and that of the Spaniards, but with this difference, that to the latter he gives gold and silver and fine clothes, but to them he transmits valour." Here the lips of the reader begin to flicker with amusement,—it is easy to see the devil under the mask of strange gods! Father Dobrizhoffer continues: "The Abipones think the Pleiades to be the representation of their grandfather; and as that constellation disappears at certain periods from the sky of South America, upon such occasions, they suppose that their grandfather is sick, and are under a yearly apprehension that he is going to die: but as soon as those seven stars are again visible in the month of May, they welcome their grandfather, as if returned and restored from sickness, with joyful shouts, and the festive sound of pipes and trumpets, congratulating him on the recovery of his health. 'What thanks do we owe thee! and art thou returned at last? Ah! thou hast happily recovered!' With such exclamations, expressive of their joy and folly, do they fill the air."

Dobrizhoffer devotes a learned and amusing chapter to "Conjectures why the Abipones take the Evil Spirit for their Grandfather and the Pleiades for the representation of him"; in which, finding no Scriptural explanation, he concludes that the cult came ultimately from Peru (the Peruvian's knowledge of God did not come along with it because "vice is more easily learnt than virtue"). As a matter of fact the Pleiades cult extends throughout Brazil, its seasonal reappearance being the occasion, as Dobrizhoffer narrates, of a great feast of intoxication and joy, a veritable Dionysia. And it is hardly to be doubted that the Abipone, as their own traditions indicate, came from the north, probably from the Chaco. It is to a contemporary missionary, Barbrooke Grubb, who has spent an even longer time in the Chaco than did the Jesuit among the Abipone, that we owe the completer interpretation of the ideas which Dobrizhoffer sketched. The Chaco Indians are as near untouched savages as any people on the globe, so that their beliefs are essentially uncontaminated.

The mythology of the Chaco tribes, says Grubb,[206] is founded on the idea of a Creator, symbolized by the beetle. First, the material universe was made; then the Beetle-Creator sent forth from its hole in the earth a race of First Beings, who for a time ruled all. Afterward the Beetle formed a man and a woman from the clay which it threw up from its hole, the two being joined like the Siamese twins. They were persecuted by the beings who preceded them, whereupon the Beetle separated them and endowed them with the power of reproduction, whence the world was peopled and came to its present state.

Whether or no the First Beings, hostile to man, are to be identified with the Kilyikhama, a class of nature daemones, Grubb does not make clear. He does, however, describe numerous of these daemonic forms,—the white Kilyikhama, heard whistling in his little craft on the swampy waters; the boy Kilyikhama with lights on each side of his head, the thieving Kilyikhama; and most dreaded of all the daemon, immensely tall and extremely thin, with eyes like balls of fire, whose appearance presages instant death. In addition to these daemones, Aphangak, ghosts of men, are intensely feared, and there are ghosts of animals, too, to be dreaded,—though, curiously, none of fish or serpents. The Milky Way is supposed to be the path of the Kilyikhama, some of whom, in the form of large white birds, are believed there to await their opportunity to descend into the bodies of men. A very curious burial custom is also associated with the Galaxy: when a person is laid out (sometimes even before the dying has breathed his last) an incision is made in the side of the body and heated stones are inserted; these stones are supposed to ascend into the Milky Way whence they await their opportunity to fall upon the person (wizard or other) who has caused the death. "Consequently the Indians are very frightened when they see a falling star." Whirlwinds are believed to be the passing of spirits, and the whole realm of the meteorological is full of portents,—the rainbow, oddly enough, conceived as a serpentine monster, being a sign of calamity rather than an arc of hope.

Of the Pleiades Grubb says that they are known by two names—Mounting-in-the-South and Holders-Together. "Their rising is connected with the beginning of spring, and feasts are held at this time, generally of a markedly immoral character." That they call the constellation Aksak, Grandfather, is not, in the missionary's opinion, due to the fact that it is the image or embodiment of the devil (as Dobrizhoffer supposed of the similar Abiponean custom). Aksak is rather a term applied to any person or thing whose nature is not quite understood or with whom power and authority rest: "what is most important of all, they term the creator beetle aksak." Grubb concludes: "In my opinion, the statement of Dobrizhoffer that the Abipones looked upon themselves as descendants, or, it may be, the creation of their 'grandfather the devil,' is nothing more nor less than the widespread tradition that man was created by the beetle, and, therefore, their originator, instead of being a devil, was rather a creating god." Perhaps, after all, Tertullian is right.

The missionary also speaks of "a remarkable theory" held by the Indians, that among the stars there are countries similar to their own, with forests and lakes, which he would explain either as tales of the mirage or as due to "a childlike notion that the sky is solid." The "childlike notion" is, of course, but another instance of a conception that prevails among the native tribes of the two Americas, as far as north Greenland; and along with this notion is that of an underworld to which ghosts descend, which he elsewhere mentions as characteristic of the Chaco,—though his account of their varying ideas as to the habitations of the dead shows well enough that these savage theorists are as uncertain in their location of the abode of shades as was Homer himself.