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

by Hartley Burr Alexander

This cosmogony is of the familiar primitive Indian type. Falkner, in the passage cited, goes on to describe Patagonian beliefs in regard to the fates of human souls: "Some say that the stars are old Indians; that the Milky Way is the field where the old Indians hunt ostriches [more likely, this myth attaches to the Southern Cross, as Guevara says it does with the Indians of Paraguay; and as, in North America, it attaches to the Ursa Major], and that the Magellan clouds are the feathers of the ostriches which they kill. They have an opinion that the creation is not yet exhausted; nor is all of it yet come out to the daylight of this upper world. The wizards, beating their drums, and rattling their hide bags full of shells or stones, pretend to see into other regions under the earth. Each wizard is supposed to have familiar spirits in attendance, who give supernatural information, and execute the conjurer's will. They believe that the souls of their wizards, after death, are of the number of these demons, called Valichu, to whom every evil, or unpleasant event is attributed."

Mutatis mutandis this description would apply perfectly to the shamanistic beliefs and practices of the Polar North, and it is not without significance that Prichard is drawn to point the essential analogy between the austral and boreal aborigines of America. Substitute the kayak for the horse, the seal for the guanaco, with such differences in habit as these imply, and the differences of the two peoples (psychologically, for it must be owned that in stature they are antipodes) become slight. Certainly their beliefs are almost identical: a beneficent, but precarious food-giver; a host of spiteful and dangerous powers of wind and weather; a sky-world and an underworld, with hunter-souls pursuing their earthly vocation; fey-sighted wizards and medicine-men with drums. To be sure this represents the foundation stratum of Indian ideas throughout the two Americas, the simplest form of American religious myth; but there is surely a dramatic propriety in finding this simplest form, almost in its first purity, at the wide extremes of the two continents.

Have the conceptions travelled, from pole almost to pole? or are they separate inspirations to a universal human nature from a never vastly varying environmental nature? This is a riddle not easy to solve; for while it is not difficult to imagine unrelated peoples severally framing the notion that men and animals are born out of the womb of Earth or that the image of their own hunting parties is written in the constellations—for, as Molina remarks, more than one people have "regulated the things of heaven by those of the earth,"—still it is odd to find such particular agreements constant from latitude to latitude throughout a hemisphere.

V. THE FUEGIANS

The Yahgan and Alakaluf tribes of Tierra del Fuego and the adjacent archipelago enjoy the unenviable distinction of being rated as among the lowest of human beings both as to actual culture and possible development. The earlier navigators regarded them as little more than animals—and often, unfortunately, treated them no better. Even Darwin, viewing them with the naturalist's eye, saw little but annoyance in their presence and formed a dismal estimate of their powers. "We were always much surprised at the little notice, or rather none whatever, which was evinced respecting many things, even such as boats, the use of which must have been evident. Simple circumstances,—such as the whiteness of our skins, the beauty of scarlet cloth or blue beads, the absence of women, our care in washing ourselves,—excited their admiration far more than a grand or complicated object, such as the ship."[218] Darwin, however, noted that the Indians had a sense of fairness in trade, and when missionaries settled among them other good qualities appeared. Thomas Bridges, who lived with the Yahgan as missionary for years, wrote of them, in 1891: "We find the natives work well and happily when assured of adequate reward. They shear our sheep, make fences, saw out boards and planks of all kinds, work well with the pick and spade, are good boatmen and pleasant companions." With such a tribute from one who had lived long with them it can hardly be doubted that the Yahgan are better than the common report of them,—indeed, quite the children of nature which the not unaffecting anecdotes of York Minster and Jemmy Button, among the voyages of the Beagle, should lead us to expect.

"Jemmy Button," says Captain Fitzroy,[219] "was very superstitious and a great believer in omens and dreams. He would not talk of a dead person, saying, with a grave shake of the head, 'no good, no good talk; my country never talk of dead man.' While at sea, on board the Beagle, about the middle of the year 1832, he said one morning to Mr. Bynoe, that in the night some man came to the side of his hammock, and whispered in his ear that his father was dead. Mr. Bynoe tried to laugh him out of the idea, but ineffectually. He fully believed that such was the case, and maintained his opinion up to the time of finding his relations in the Beagle Channel, when, I regret to say, he found that his father had died some months previously. He did not forget to remind Mr. Bynoe (his most confidential friend) of their former conversation, and, with a significant shake of the head said, it was 'bad—very bad.' Yet these simple words seemed to express the extent of his sorrow."... Here is surely as good a case of the "veridical" apparition as any Researcher could desire.

"Ideas of a spiritual existence—of beneficent and evil powers," describes the nearest notion Captain Fitzroy could get of Fuegian religion. The powers of evil are especially the powers of wind and weather—naturally enough in a part of the globe world-famous for its bitter gales and treacherous waters. "If anything was said or done that was wrong, in their opinion it was certain to cause bad weather. Even the shooting of young birds, before they were able to fly, was thought a heinous offence. I remember York Minster saying one day to Mr. Bynoe, when he had shot some young ducks with the old bird—'Oh, Mr. Bynoe, very bad to shoot little duck—come wind—come rain—blow—very much blow.'" Primitive as they are, here are moral ideas—-whether one explain, reconditely, the sparing of the young of game as an instinctive conservation of the food supply, or, simply, as due to a natural and chivalrous pity for the helpless young.

Our information in regard to the spirit-beings believed in by the Fuegians is at best nebulous. Captain Fitzroy tells of "a great black man ... supposed to be always wandering about the woods and mountains, who is certain of knowing every word and action, who cannot be escaped, and who influences the weather according to men's conduct," and again of thin wild men, "who have no belly," (surely, the "skeleton men" of the Eskimo and of other North American tribes). Dr. Hyades,[220] in his report of the gleanings of the French Mission to Cape Horn, half a century after the famous expeditions of the Adventure and Beagle, gives a fuller, though still meagre description of these wild folk of Yahgan fancy,—irresistibly reminiscent of the Fog People and the Inland Dwellers of the Eskimo at the other extreme of the hemisphere. The Oualapatou, Wild Men from the West, are ever-present terrors. They are heard in the noises of the night, and hearing them, the Yahgan incontinently flee. These Wild Men, they say, enter their huts at night, cut the throats of the occupants and devour their limbs. From their confused accounts, says Dr. Hyades, it would appear that the Oualapatou are the dead returned to earth to eat the living; they are invisible, except at the moment of seizing their victims, but they are heard imitating the cries of birds and animals. Another class of wild beings are the Kachpikh, fantastic beings that live in desert caves or in thick forests. These, too, are invisible, but they hate man and cause disease and death. Still another class (reported by the Missionary Bridges) are called Hannouch. Some of these are supposed to have an eye in the back of their heads; others are hairless and sleep standing up supported by a tree; they hold in hand a white stone which they hurl with inevitable aim at any object soever, and they sometimes attack and wound men. One man, said to have been stolen away as a child by the Hannouch, was named Hannouchmachaaïnan, "stolen-by-the-Hannouch." Any man who goes off to live by himself is called a Hannouch, while a demented person is regarded as tormented by one of these beings.

The Fuegian's equivalent for the Eskimo's Angakok is the Yakamouch. Bridges' account is quoted by Hyades: "Nearly every old man of the people is a Yakamouch, for it is very easy to become one; they are recognizable at a glance from the gray colour of their hair, a colour produced by the daily application of a whitish clay. They make frequent incantations in which they appear to address a mysterious being named Aïapakal; they claim to possess, from a spirit called Hoakils, a supernatural power of life and death; they recount their dreams, and when they have eaten in dream any person, this signifies that that person will die. It is believed that they can draw from the bodies of the sick the cause of their ill, called aïkouch, visible in the form of an arrow or a harpoon point of flint, which they cause, moreover, to issue from their own stomachs at will.... They seem to believe that these sorcerers can influence the weather for good or bad; they throw shells into the wind to cause it to cease and they give themselves over to incantations and contortions." Women also may be Yakamouch, and there is even a report that formerly none but women professed the art.

The Fuegians are a vanishing people,—even in a vanishing race. They have long and often been cited as a people without religion. After recounting what is here narrated of their beliefs, Dr. Hyades concludes: "In all these legends, we see no reason seriously to admit a belief in supernatural beings or in a future life, and consequently a religious sentiment, among the Fuegians." This judgement, however, is not wholly supported by the observations of others. According to the fathers of the Salesian mission[221] the Alakaluf believe in "an invisible being called Taquatú, whom they imagine to be a giant who travels by day and night in a big canoe, over the sea and rivers, and who glides as well through the air over the tops of the trees without bending their branches; if he finds any men or women idle or not on the alert he takes them without more ado into his great boat and carries them far away from home." Captain Low, of the Fitzroy expedition, asserted that there was not only a belief in "an immense black man" (Yaccy-ma) responsible for all sorts of evil, among the west Patagonian channel natives, but also that they believed in "a good spirit whom they called Yerri Yuppon," invoked in time of distress and danger. On the other point, of belief in a future life, there is no doubt but that the Fuegians recognize some form of ghost, or breath-spirit, which haunts the walks of men. One missionary says of the Yahgan that he thinks that "when a man dies, his breath goes up to heaven"; nothing similar occurs in the case of animals.