The anaconda is looked upon as an evil spirit. It is the embodiment of the water spirit, the Yacu-mama,[365] whose coils may bar the passage of the streams, and the Indian goes in terror of it, nor would he bathe in its vicinity, though, so far as my experience went, the gigantic reptile will not attack human beings unprovoked.[366] The Yacu-mama, as the name signifies, is the mother, the spirit of the streams. Among some tribes, though not in my field of exploration, a relationship is held to exist between this water-spirit and Jurupari, so it is said.[367] It occupies the place in Amazonian folk-tales filled by the sea-serpent of Europe; while the manatee and the dolphin are the Amazonian mermaids. The cow-fish, or manatee,[368] is an object of wonder on the main stream, but is unknown on the upper rivers. I have never seen one nearer than the mouth of the Issa river. The dolphin also is not found in the higher waters. On the lower rivers it abounds, but, according to Bates, no Indian willingly kills one; and though dolphin fat makes good oil the belief is current that when burnt in lamps it causes blindness.[369]
Tigers are not killed unless they be the aggressors, that is to say they are never killed wantonly. The reason for this is not cowardice, but fear of further aggression on the part of the tiger family, or from the family of the medicine-man who has assumed tiger form. Indians look upon animals as having the same instincts as themselves, and therefore capable of a prolonged blood-feud with humans who may have wronged them. The tribesman is accordingly anxious not to provoke war with the tiger tribe, but if Indians are challenged by the death of one of their number the case is altered, and they will immediately accept combat. To hunt a jaguar without provocation merely for food or for sport would be foolishly to kindle the animosity of the whole tiger family, to rouse the violent enmity of the wandering spirit domiciled for a time in the body of the hunted beast. But when an Indian is killed, or a child lost—and tigers are usually credited with the destruction of any child missing from its home—the medicine-man is called upon, and he proceeds to discover that it was a tribal enemy working in disguise, probably the spirit of a hostile medicine-man, intent to destroy the tribe by thus slaying potential warriors or mothers of warriors. The tiger is in these circumstances to be treated as a human enemy. A big tribal hunt is organised, and if the quarry be secured a feast of tiger-flesh follows, a feast of revenge, very similar in detail to the anthropophagous orgies already described.[370] At no other time does the Indian eat jaguar meat. The tiger-skin becomes the property of the medicine-man, whose magic has thus triumphed over the magic of a rival.
I have already noted that anything abnormal or unknown is regarded with suspicious dread. My camera was naturally endowed by Indian imagination with magical properties, the most general idea among the Boro being that it was an infernal machine, designed to steal the souls of those who were exposed to its baleful eye. In like manner my eyeglass was supposed to give me power to see what was in their hearts. When I first attempted to take photographs the natives were considerably agitated by my use of a black cloth to envelop the evil thing; and when my own head went under it they had but one opinion, it also was some strange magic-working that would enable me to read their minds, their unprofessed intentions, and steal their souls away; or rather become master of their souls, and thus make them amenable to my will at any time or in any place. This was undoubtedly due in part to the fact that I was able to reproduce the photograph. The Indian was brought face to face with his naked soul, represented by the miniature of himself in the photographic plate. One glance, and one only, could he be induced to give. Never again would he be privy to such magic. The Witoto women believed that I was working more material magic, and feared should they suffer exposure to the camera that they would bear resultant offspring to whom the camera—or the photographer—would stand in paternal relation.
PLATE L.
GROUP OF WITOTO WOMEN BY DOUBLE-STEMMED PALM TREE
GROUP OF WITOTO MEN BY DOUBLE-STEMMED PALM TREE
To cite another instance of the attitude of the Indian towards the abnormal. A certain Witoto tribe have a tree that they regard as an object almost of veneration. This palm, as may be seen in the photographs, has a forked stem, the trunk dividing into two some few feet above the ground. I met with no more formulated sign of tree-worship than this. Unquestionably, though they did not worship—for as I have said, these Indians worship nothing—the Witoto looked upon this tree as a thing to be respected, prized, and if it were not meted proper treatment perchance to be definitely feared.[371]
Finally, in addition to all these spirits good or evil, the tribes south of the Japura are concerned with the sun and the moon. These are venerated, the sun as a great and sympathetic spirit, but not an incarnation of the great Good Spirit, the moon as his wife, who is sent betimes by the sun into the heavens at night to prevent the evil spirits from depopulating the world. Of the stars these people seem to have the vaguest ideas, and only one Boro explained to me that they were the souls of the chiefs and of the great men of his tribe.[372]
The Indian lives in a world of imagined dangers, over and above the real ones that confront him at every turn. There is possible menace in any place, dormant hostility in all surrounding nature, active menace in the unfamiliar and unknown. One might expect to find that he decked his person and his belongings with an unlimited number of charms, to protect against these battalions of evil. But it is not so. The Tukano do, it is said, place certain green, sweet-smelling herbs under the girdle as a love charm, to attract the opposite sex, but nothing of this sort is known south of the Japura, and charms, as the western world knows them, hardly exist. I know of none beyond the medicine-man’s magical stones, the iguana-skin wristlets of the men and the wooden ring placed on a child’s arm, which appear to partake of the nature of charms. Magic is to be met by magic, not by material properties. The hostile evils that threaten a man are only to be turned aside by the exercise of more powerful anti-hostility on the part of his medicine-man. But the Indian must go warily, observe signs and portents, pay due heed to good and evil omens. He must, for example, never shoot a poisonous snake with a blow-pipe. Should he do so one poison will neutralise the other, and destroy not only the poison on the arrow that wounded the snake, but also all poison whatever that was in his possession at the time. It is magic against magic.