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Latin American Mythology
By Hartley Burr Alexander
CHAPTER X. THE PAMPAS TO THE LAND OF FIRE
I The Far South
II El Chaco and the Pampeans
III The Araucanians
IV The Patagonians
V The Fuegians
I. THE FAR SOUTH
1 THE Rio de la Plata is the third of the great river systems which drain the South American continent. It combines the waters of the Uruguay, draining the hilly region of southern Brazil, with those of the Parana, which through its numerous tributaries taps the heart of the south central portion of the continent. The Parana and its continuation, the Paraguay, flowing almost due south from the centre of the continent, form a kind of axis, dividing the hilly lands on the east from the great woodland plains known as the Chaco, stretching west-ward to the Andes, from whose age-worn detritus they were doubtless formed. The northern boundary of the Chaco is in the neighbourhood of the Tropic of Capricorn; southward the plains extend far into Argentina, narrowing with the encroach ing mountains, and finally giving way to the grassy pampas, in the latitude of Buenos Aires. These, in turn, extend southward to the Patagonian plains geologically one of earth's youngest regions, of which the terminus is the mountain region meeting the southern straits. Parallel with this stretch of open country, which diminishes in width as the southern latitudes are approached, is the Andean ridge, almost due north and south in sense, scarcely varying the width of the western coastal region which it marks off, but eastward extending in heavier lines of ridges and broader plateaus as the centre of the continent is approached. South of latitude 40 the western coastal region, with the sinking of the Andean range, merges in a long archipelago leading on to Tierra del Fuego and its satellite islands, beyond the Straits of Magellan, an archipelago which is the far southern counterpart of that reaching along North America from Puget Sound to the Aleutian Isles.
The aboriginal peoples of the region thus described fall into a number of groups of exceptional interest to the ethnologist. In the Chaco. to the north, are to be found, to this day, tribes practically untouched by the influence of civilization tribes in the state which for untold centuries must have been that of the peoples of central South America. Some of them show signs of having been under the influence of the cultured peoples of the Andean regions, preserving in their fabrics, for example, figured designs strikingly like those of Incaic Peru. It has even been suggested that the region is in no small part peopled by descendants of Indians who in former times fled from the west, first before the armies of the Incas, later before the advance of Spanish power.
This constant pressure, which can in a measure be followed in historic times, has had its effect in pushing southward peoples whose origin must be sought in the central region. Such a people are the Abipone a group of tribes which owe their especial fame among South American Indians perhaps more to the fact that they were so faithfully pictured by Father Dobrizhoffer, during the period in which they were gathered in missions, than to their own qualities, striking as these are. In any case, the Abipone, who in the eighteenth century had become an equestrian people of the open country, had, according to their own tradition, moved southward out of the forests, bearing with them many of the traits still to be found among the tribes of the Chaco.
The Calchaqui civilization, of the Andean region just north of latitude 30 was one of the latest conquests of the Inca power, and represents its southerly extension. The actual dividing line, as recorded by Garcilasso, was the river Rapel, latitude 34, where, according to the historian, the Inca Tupac Yupanqui was held in his southward advance by the Araucanian (or Aucanian) tribes who formed the population of Chile and west central Argentina. The Araucanians enjoy the proud distinction of being to this day an unconquered people; for they held their own in long and bloody wars with the Spaniards, as before they had held against the aggressive Incas. Further, in their general culture, and in intellectual vigor, they stand at the head of the peoples of southerly South America.
Scarcely less in romantic interest is the group of peoples - the Puelche and Tehuelche tribal stocks forming the Patagonian race, whose tall stature, exaggerated in the imagination of early discoverers, made of them a race of giants. Like the Pampean tribes they early become horsemen, expert with the bolas; and with no permanent villages and no agriculture, they remain equestrian nomads of the southern plains. The Ona of Tierra del Fuego represent a non-equestrian as they are also a non-canoe-using branch of the Patagonian race. Altogether different are the canoe peoples of the southern archipelago, the Alakaluf and the Yahgan. These have shared with the Australian Blacks, with the Botocudo, and with one or two other groups of human beings, the reputation of representing the lowest grade of human intelligence and attainment. They were long thought to be hopelessly imbruted, though this judgement is being somewhat revised in the face of the achievements of missionary workers among them. Still there are few more striking contrasts in the field of ethnology than is that between the culture of the peoples of the Pacific archipelago of the northern America, with their elaborate society, art, and mythology, and the mentally deficient and culturally destitute savages of the island region of austral America.
II. EL CHACO AND THE PAMPEANS
In d'Orbigny's classification the Pampean race is divided into three groups. Of these the most northerly is the Moxean, comprising tribes about the headwaters of the Madeira. Next southward is the Chiquitean branch, with their centre on the divide between the headwaters of the Madeira and those of the southward flowing Paraguay and Pilcomayo rivers; hence marking the division of the Amazonian and La Plata systems. Still south of these is the main Pampean branch, its northerly reach being represented by the Toba, Lengua, and other Chaco stocks; its centre by the Mocobi, Abipone, and the Charrua of Uruguay (whom other authorities ally with the Brazilian stocks); its southerly division comprising the Puelche and the Tehuelche, or Patagonians proper. So far as the Pampean branch is concerned, this grouping corresponds with ideas still received.
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 2 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 3 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 quern ignorare non possitj 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 Queevet, 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 grand-father, 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, 4 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-Southand 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.
III. THE ARAUCANIANS
The Araucanian, or Auca, tribes of which the Mapuche, Pehuenche, and Huiliche are the more important divisions, while the southerly Chono and Chiloe are remote branches - are the aborigines of the southern Andean region, inhabiting both slopes of the mountains, extending to the sea on the Pacific side and out into the Patagonian plains on the Atlantic side. Of all the extreme austral Indians they represent from pre-Columbian times the highest culture, though it is evident that the process of acculturation was recent when the whites first appeared, resulting from contact with Inca and Calchaqui civilizations. The whole group of Araucanians proper was organized into a confederacy, with four principal divisions, uniting for common defence, an organization very similar to that of the Iroquois Confederacy in North America, and equally effective; for the Araucanians not only put a stop to the southerly aggressions of the Incas, but they also successfully resisted the Spaniards, establishing for themselves a unique place in the history of American aborigines in contact with the white race. In manner of life the Araucanians were originally little if any in advance of their Patagonian neighbours; but as a result of their contact with the northerly Andean peoples, their own northern branches had acquired, when the Spaniards first came, a rudimentary agriculture, the potter's and the weaver's arts, some skill with gold and silver, and the habit of domesticating the guanaco, and this culture was gradually extending to the south. As a whole, however, Araucanian culture represents a sharp descent, marked by the boundaries of the Incaic empire.
The romantic history of the Araucanians, and especially their heroic wars with the Spaniards, have naturally attracted to them an unusual measure of historical and anthropological investigation, so the literature is copious. Molina's History, written in the middle of the eighteenth century, is the best known work in the field, and is, in a sense, the classic exposition of Araucanian institutions, though both for extent and accuracy it has been superseded by later works, pre-eminently those of Jose Medina and Tomas Guevara. 5 The first volume of the latter's great Historia de la Civilization de Araucania is devoted to "Antropolojia Araucana," and in it is given a summary of the native pantheon.
First of the gods is Pillan, often regarded as the Araucanian equivalent of the Tupan of the forest regions of Brazil, god of thunder and spirit of fire. "This conception represents a survival of the prehistoric idea which considers fire as the life-principle, carried to the point of adoring it as an invisible and personal power . . . forces of nature, such as this, being personified in the mind of the barbarian." Pillan, however, while a personal, is also a collective power: caciques at their death and warriors who fall in battle pass into the category of Pilli, some being converted into volcanic forces, others ascending to the clouds. "From this source," says Guevara, "is due the belief, conserved almost to this time, that a tempest is a battle between their ancestors and their enemies, and the custom of encouraging their own and imprecating the others according to the turn of the battle : if the clouds move toward the south victory pertains to those of their race; if to the north the country of the Spaniards they suppose the latter to be victorious." . . . Inevitably one recalls the bodeful thunderstorm in Julius Caesar,
"Fierce fiery warriors fought upon the clouds,
In ranks and squadrons and right form of war,
Which drizzled blood upon the Capitol;
The noise of battle hurtled in the air,
Horses did neigh, and dying men did groan,
And ghosts did shriek and squeal about the streets."
Pillan, as the supreme god of a warlike people, was naturally regarded as the god of war. "They made his habitation," says our author, "in all those parts whence breaks the thunder: on the crest of high mountains, in the clouds, and in the volcanoes, whose eruptions are so often accompanied by electrical phenomena." The deity's name is, as a matter of fact, preserved in the names of various peaks.
Molina 6 states that the word Pillan is derived from pilli, meaning "soul," and that the god has various attributive designations, such as Spirit-of-Heaven (Guenu-pillan), the Great Being, the Thunderer; and along with these, suspiciously European, such epithets as the Creator, the Omnipotent, the Eternal. On the whole, it is not unreasonable to assume that the true aboriginal meaning of the word is mysterious power" and that the idea itself belongs with the group of conceptions of a semi-pantheistic nature power, of which Wakanda and Manito are the best-known names.
That Pillan stands at the head of a hierarchy of nature powers is the unanimous testimony of authorities. Molina believes that the government of Pillan is modelled on that of the Araucanian confederacy. He is the great chief of the invisible world, having under him his high-chiefs and under-chiefs to conduct cosmic affairs. As with most primitive folk, the great majority of these lesser deities are considered as malignant, or at least as dangerous, rather than as beneficent powers. The Huecuvu (Guecubu, in Molina) are a group of daemones capable of assuming animal and human forms. The Indians "attribute natural phenomena to the implacable hatred of these agents of Pillan. They sow the fields with caterpillars, weaken animals with disease, quake the earth, and devour the fish in rivers and lakes. The Huecuvu corresponds with great exactness to the idea of demon." Evil also is Epunamun (whom Molina regarded as a war-god, apparently on the strength of the Padre Olivares's statement that he presided at councils of war, where "though they have no confidence in his councils, they frequently follow them, rather than offend through disobedience"). Epunamun is represented as having deformed legs, and he probably belongs to that extraordinary group of South American monster-bogeys having feet reversed or knees that bend backward. The Cherruve are the spirits or senders of shooting-stars and comets, figured (quite to the taste of the Mediaeval European) as man-headed serpents. Similar is the Ihuaivilu, a seven-headed fire-monster, inhabiting volcanic neighbourhoods. Meulen appears to be anything but the benevolent deity that Molina deemed it; he is the spirit of the whirlwind, disappearing in the ground in the form of a lizard when the whirlwind is dissipated; in modern folklore he appears as El Destolanado, devouring all children who cross his path.
The category of demonic beings is by no means exhausted with these wind and fire powers. The old Chilean mythic lore is filled with composite and metamorphosing beast-bogeys and witch-beings, many of which have been handed on to the modern peasantry; so that it is now often impossible to tell what elements are native and what communicated. Many still bear native names. Perimontum is a phantom appearing from the other world to announce some extraordinary event. The Am is the ghost of a murdered man; the Alhue is a mischievous sprite whose sport is to frighten men. Colocolo is a small, invisible or subterranean animal or bird, whose cry, colo colo! is sometimes heard; anyone drinking its saliva will die. Neguruvilu, or Guirivilo, is a cat-like monster armed with a claw-pointed tail; it lives in the depths of the waters, whence it sallies forth to kill men and animals, assuming a serpentine form as it envelops them. There are numerous other water-monsters, some marine, some amphibians, their most various forms being naturally found among the Chiletes of the southern archipelago. El Caleuche, the witch-boat, is interesting for the fact that here, in the far Pacific south, it represents what might almost be called an outcropping of the similar conceptions found among the Eskimo and the pelagic tribes of the North-West Coast. The witch-boat is seen at night, illuminated, and it carries fishermen down to the treasure-houses at the bottom of the sea. Another monster of this region is Camahueto, capable of wrecking large boats; while Cuero, known to the Araucanians as Trelquehuecuve, is a sort of huge octopus, whose arms end in claws and whose ears are covered with eyes; it has great powers of dilation and contraction, and seizes and slays all that fall within its reach; when it goes ashore to sun itself and wishes to return to its element, it raises a gale which pushes it into the water. Huaillepeii, or Guallipen, is in the form of a calfheaded sheep, with deformed legs; it issues from streams and pools on misty mornings and frightens pregnant women, causing their children to be born deformed. The Imbunche are monsters into which babes stolen by witches have been transformed; the Trauco is an old witch appearing in the form of a child and having the habits of an incubus; the Pihuichefi, or Piguchen, is a vampire-like serpent that can transform itself into a frog, a blood-sucker and death-bringer, while the Chonchon, a vampire having the form of a human head whose huge ears serve as wings for its nocturnal flights, is reminiscent of the travelling heads which form so important a group of bogeys on the North American continent.
With such an array of demons surrounding them, it is small marvel that for the Chilean peasant of today the devil is not an interesting person in popular mythology, as Senor Vicuna Cifuentes tells us, 7 playing a role altogether inferior to those of the local demons. Beneficent powers are rare in the Araucanian pantheon. Pillan may be regarded in this light, as also Ngunemapun, a higher power recognized by the Araucans of today, says Guevara, although not mentioned in the older chronicles. He seems to be a doublet of Pillan, and may represent an epithet of this god, or even a still higher power to whom invocations were formerly addressed which the Spaniards supposed to be addressed to Pillan. Like the latter, Ngunemapun dwells on high mountains, has the power of rendering himself invisible, and is given the customary form of a warrior. Beneficent also is Huitranalhue, friend of strangers and the protector of herds from thieves.
A curious feature of Araucanian religion is the absence of any cult of the sun. Possibly this is due to the fact that the sun was the great deity of their enemies, the Incas; so that even if it had been adored in the primitive period, it might have been degraded after the Incaic defeat on the same principle that caused a Florida tribe to establish a cult of the Devil, because he was the enemy of the Spaniard. The fact that the Araucanians had measured the solar year, which they divided into twelve months of thirty days each, adding five intercalary days or epagomenae, argues a sun-cult. Molina tells us that they began their year immediately after the December solstice, which they called the Head-and-Tail-of-the-Year, while the June solstice was called the Divider-of-the-Year. Dobrizhoffer says that the Picunche, or Moluche (Araucanians), like the Puelche, had no name for God. 8 "These ascribe all the good things they either possess or desire to the sun, and to the sun they pray for them"; and one of their priests, he says, when told of God, said: "Till this hour we never knew nor acknowledged anything greater or better than the sun." This certainly points to the probability that in primitive times the sun was an Araucanian god, though it appears that the moon has assumed the place of celestial importance in the later pantheon. Her ancient name, Anchimalguen, signifies, says Guevara, Woman (i. e., wife)-of-the-Sun; Anchimallen is the contemporary form. She is implored in adversity and praised in prosperity, say the chroniclers. Sometimes Anchimallen is of ill omen, appearing at night in the form of a stray guanaco and luring travellers to vain pursuit; but she also serves to give warning of enemies and to frighten away evil spirits. Molina gives a very interesting suggestion, namely, that all the female powers of the invisible world form a class of beneficent nymphs called Amchimalghen. "There is not an Araucanian but imagines he has one of these in his service. Nien cai gni Amchi-malghen, 'I keep my nymph still,' is a common expression when they succeed in any undertaking."
The mythic tales of the Araucanians are (judging from somewhat meagre materials) of a class with those prevalent in neighbouring regions, a cosmogony in which volcanic forces destroy the world by fire, while a deluge causes all to perish save a few who flee to the three-peaked mountain Thegtheg, the Mount of Levin, which moves upon the waters; a hero cycle in which two brothers, Konkel and Pediu, figure as transformers; and there are stories of a Sky-World above, and of seaward Islands of the Dead. 9 One of the most interesting elements of their mythology is their version of the oft-recurring conception of a Way Perilous to the abode of the departed. An old woman, in the form of a whale, bears the soul out to sea; but before his arrival in the Araucanian Hades he is obliged to pay toll for passing a narrow strait, where sits another malignant hag who exacts an eye from any poor wretch who has nothing better to pay.
IV. THE PATAGONIANS
Few peoples have had fame thrust upon them with so little reason as have the Patagonian Indians, and few myths have been more widely credited than that Patagonia was the home of a race of giants. The Tehuelche are, as a matter of fact, men of large size, probably averaging above six feet; and they are noted for the large development, especially of the upper parts of their body. Keane states that they are second in size among South American peoples, being exceeded by the Bororo. Possibly it was due to the fact that the first navigators of this region were men of south Europe, themselves short, which gave rise to the myth of Patagonian giants. Pigafetta, 10 the chief chronicler of Magellan's voyage, says of one of these "giants" that he was "so tall that our heads scarcely came up to his waist," and the anonymous "Genoese pilot" who has left an account of the same navigation reports that where they wintered, in 1520, "there were people like savages, and the men are from nine to ten spans in height, very well made." It is, indeed, possible that the stature of the modern Tehuelche is modified slightly from that of the Patagon, or "Big-Foot" ("the captain named this kind of people Pataghom," wrote Pigafetta) ; for since the middle of the eighteenth century the Tehuelche have been an equestrian people, living on horseback, one might say; and a recent observer says of them that "the lower limbs are sometimes disappointing, being, in fact, the lower limbs of a race of riders." Such an influence may well have produced a small diminution of the average stature over that at the time of the first observations.
In no other respect is the Patagonian remarkable. The race is divided into two great divisions, the northerly Puelche and the Tehuelche, of Patagonia proper, now both equestrian peoples. Across the Strait of Magellan, in eastern Tierra del Fuego, dwell the Ona, still a pedestrian branch of the Patagonian race.
The Patagonians are a sluggish and peaceable people, quite self-sufficient when left to themselves, and in the south little influenced by the arts of civilization. Except for the changes which the introduction of horses has brought into their life, the description of the Genoese pilot is essentially true to this day: 10 "They have not got houses; they only go about from one place to another . . . and eat meat nearly raw: they are all archers and kill many animals with arrows, and with the skins they make clothes. . . . Wherever night finds them, there they sleep; they carry their wives along with them with all the chattels they possess."
Accounts of Patagonian religion are all meagre; perhaps because the ideational content of their belief is itself meagre, for authorities agree that they are slow and unimaginative. The little information given by Pigafetta, chronicler of Magellan's voyage, has, to be sure, a moving background. Two of the "giants," he says, were lured on shipboard, and there, while being entertained with gauds, were clamped with irons, the intention being to take them for a show to the Castilian king. "When they saw the trick which had been played them, they began to be enraged, and to foam like bulls, crying out very loud Setebos, that is to say, the great devil, that he should help them." It is from this passage that Shakespeare derived his conception of the god of Caliban. Pigafetta adds that the lesser devils, under Setebos, are called Cheleule. "This one who was in the ship with us, told us by signs that he had seen devils with two horns on their heads, and long hair down to their feet, who threw out fire from their mouths and rumps," but we can hardly doubt that the navigators' imaginations were here potent interpreters of the signs. Dobrizhoffer's eighteenth century description of Patagonian beliefs is essentially the same as that of Prichard in the twentieth century. 11
"They are all acquainted with the devil, whom they call Balichu [Falichu, Gualichu, are variants found in other sources]. They believe that there is an innumerable crowd of demons, the chief of whom they name El El, and all the inferior ones Quezubu [probably a form of the Araucanian Huecuvu}. They think, however, every kind of demon hostile and mischievous to the human race, and the origin of all evil, regarding them in consequence with dread and abhorrence." Dobrizhoffer goes on to state that the Puelche and the Araucanian Picunche alike revere the Sun, indicating the affinity of the beliefs of the two groups, which are probably at least remotely related. He continues: "The Patagonians call God Soychu [Soucha is Pennant's variant], to-wit, that which cannot be seen, which is worthy of all veneration, which does not live in the world; hence they call the dead Soychuhet, men that dwell with God beyond the world. They seem to hold two principles in common with the Gnostics and Manichaeans, for they say that God created both good and evil demons. The latter they greatly fear, but never worship. They believe every sick person to be possessed of an evil demon; hence their physicians always carry a drum with figures of devils painted on it, which they strike at the beds of sick persons, to drive the evil demon, which causes the disorder, from the body."
Prichard's description adds nothing to this. 12 The religion of the Indians consists "in the old simple beliefs in good spirits and devils, but chiefly devils. . . . The dominant Spirit of Evil is called Gualicho. And he abides as an ever-present terror behind their strange, free, and superstitious lives. They spend no small portion of their time in either fleeing from his wrath or in propitiating it. You may wake in the dawn to see a band of Indians suddenly rise and leap upon their horses, and gallop away across the pampa, howling and gesticulating. They are merely scaring the Gualicho away from their tents back to his haunts in the Cordillera the wild and unpenetrated mountains, where he and his subordinate demons groan in chosen spots the long nights through." The Good Spirit of the Tehuelche, says Prichard, is far more quiescent. Long ago he made one effort to benefit mankind, when he created the animals in the caves of "God's Hill" and gave them to his people for food, but since then he has shown little interest in earthly matters. Of the practices of the Tehuelche shaman perhaps an innovation since the day of DobrizhofTer Prichard gives an odd instance, narrated by another white observer: "In the middle of the level white pampa two figures upon galloping horses were visible. As we came nearer we saw that one was a man clothed in a chiripa and a capa in which brown was the predominating colour. He was mounted on a heavy-necked powerful cebruno horse, his stirrups were of silver, and his gear of raw-hide seemed smart and good. As he rode he yelled with all his strength, producing a series of the most horrible and piercing shrieks. But strange as was this wild figure, his companion, victim or quarry, was stranger and more striking still. For on an ancient zaino sat perched a little brown maiden, whose aspect was forelorn and pathetic to the last degree. She rode absolutely naked in the teeth of the bitter cold, her breast, face and limbs blotched and smeared with the rash of some eruptive disease, and her heavy-lidded eyes, strained and open, staring ahead across the leagues of empty snow-patched plain. Presently the man redoubled his howls, and bearing down upon the zaino flogged and frightened it into yet greater speed. The whole scene might have been mistaken for some ancient barbaric and revolting form of punishment; whereas, in real truth, it was an anxious Indian father trying, according to his lights, to cure his daughter of measles!" Devils are known to dislike noise and cold, says Prichard; hence, the unlucky patient without a shred to protect her and "the almost incredible uproar made by the old gentleman upon the dark brown horse." D'Orbigny says 13 of the Tehuelche, "they fear rather than revere their Achekanet-kanet, turn by turn genius of ill and genius of good," and of the Puelche that, like the Patagonians, they believe in a genius of ill, named Gualichu, or Arraken, who sometimes becomes beneficent, without need of prayer. Falkner (cited by King in The Voyage of the Beagle, vol. ii, p. 161) mentions "at the head of their good deities," Guayara-kunny, lord of the dead. "They think," he says, "that the good deities have habitations in vast caverns under the earth, and that when an Indian dies his soul goes to live with the deity who presides over his particular family. They believe that their good deities made the world, and that they first created the Indians in the subterranean caverns above men- tioned; gave them the lance, bow and arrows, and the balls [bolas], to fight and hunt with, and then turned them out to shift for themselves. They imagine that the deities of the Spaniards created them in a similar manner, but that, instead of lances, bows, etc., they gave them guns and swords. They say that when the beasts, birds, and lesser animals were created, those of the more nimble kind came immediately out of the caverns ; but that the bulls and cows being the last, the Indians were so frightened at the sight of their horns, that they stopped the entrances of their caves with great stones. This is the grave reason why they had no black cattle in their country, till the Spaniards brought them over; who, more wisely, had let them out of their caves."
A more recent account of what is a kindred, if not the same myth is given by Ramon Lista. 14 The creator-hero, in this version, is named El-lal. "El-lal came into the world in a strange way. His father Nosjthej (a kind of Saturn), wishing to devour him, had snatched him from his mother's womb. He owed his rescue to the intervention of the terguerr (a rodent) which carried him away to its cave; this his father tried in vain to enter. After having learned from the famous rodent the properties of different plants and the directions of the mountain-paths, El-lal himself invented the bow and arrow, and with these weapons began the struggle against the wild animals puma, fox, condor, and conquered them all. But the father returned. Forgetting the past El-lal taught him how to manipulate the bow and the sling, and joyfully showed him the trophies of the chase tortoise shells, condor's wings, etc. Nosjthej took up his abode in the cave and soon acted as master of it. Faithful to his fierce instincts, he wanted to kill his son; he followed him across the Andes, but, when on the point of reaching him, he saw a dense forest arise between him and his son. El-lal was saved; he descended to the plain, which meanwhile had become peopled with men. Among them was a giant, Goshy-e, who devoured children; El-lal tried to fight him, but he was invulnerable; the arrows broke against his body. Then El-lal transformed himself into a gadfly, entered the giant's stomach, and wounded him fatally with this sting. It was not until he had accomplished all these feats, and had proved himself a clever huntsman, that El-lal thought of marrying. He asked the hand of the daughter of the Sun, but she did not think him worthy of her and escaped him by a subterfuge. Disenchanted, El-lal decided to leave the earth, where, he considered, his mission was at an end, since man, who had in the meantime appeared in the plain and in the mountain valleys, had learned from him the use of fire, weapons, etc. Borne on the wings of a swan across the ocean towards the east, he found eternal rest in the verdant island which rose among the waves at the places where the arrows shot by him had fallen on the surface of the water."
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." 15 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, 16 "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, 17 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 Hannouchmachaa'inan, "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 Ai'apakal; 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 aikouch, 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 18 the Alakaluf believe in "an invisible being called Taquatu, 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.
Of myth in the legendary form only meagre fragments have been gathered from the Fuegians, and of these the greater part come from the Ona, who are akin to the Tehuelche. 19 According to Ona lore there formerly "lived on earth bearded white men; the sun and moon were then husband and wife; when men began to war, the sun and moon returned to the sky and sent down a red star, the planet Mars, which turned into a giant on the way; the giant killed all men, then made two mountains or clods of clay, from one of which rose the first Ona man and from the other the first Ona woman." The same tribe have a tradition of a cataclysm which separated the island on which they dwell from the mainland. Both the Ona and the Yahgan have traditions of a flood and tales of earth-born men; and each of these peoples has also a mythic hero (Kuanip is the Ona, Oumoara the Yahgan name) concerning whom tales are told. Some of their stories appear to relate to historical transformations in the mode of tribal life, as the tradition (maintained by both tribes) that in former times the women were the tribal rulers, that the men rebelled, and invented initiation rites and the ruse of masked spirits in order to keep the women in subjection a type of myth which, however, is rather more plausibly, of an aetiological than of an historical character. In the main, nature is the theme of mythic thought, and there is perhaps no more unique a group of ideas among these peoples of the Far South than the Yahgan conception of the relations of the celestial beings : the moon, they say, is the wife of the rainbow, while the sun is elder brother to the moon and to shining Venus.
There is much in the culture and fancies of these peoples of austral America to recall the culture and fancies of their remote kinsmen of the Polar North. The two Americas measure, as it were, the longitude of human habitation, marked off zone by zone into every variety of climate and terrain to which men's lives can be accommodated. Moreover, the native peoples of this New World show a oneness of race nowhere else to be found over so great an area; so that, in spite of differences in culture almost as great as those which mark the heights and depths of human condition in the more anciently peopled hemisphere, there is a recognizable unity binding together Eskimo and Aztec, Inca and Yahgan. Now what is surely most impressive is that this unity is best represented neither by physical appearance nor material achievement (where, indeed, the differences are most magnified), but by a conservation of ideas and of the symbolic language of myth which is at bottom one. Not that there is any single level of thought common to all, for there is surely a world of intelligence between the imaginative splendour of Mayan art and science and tradition and the dimly haunted soul of the Fuegian who "supposes the sun and moon, male and female, to be very old indeed, and that some old man, who knew their maker, had died without leaving information on this subject"; 20 but that no matter what the failure to build or the erosion of superstructure, or indeed no matter what the variety of superstructures as, for example, made apparent in the characteristic colours of North American and South American mythologies, there is still au fond a single racial complexion of mind, with a recognizable kinship of the spiritual life. Through vast geographical distances, among peoples long mutually forgotten if ever mutually known, in every variety of natural garb, polar and tropical, forest and sea, this kinship persists, not favoured by, but in spite of, environmerits the most changing. It is not necessary here invariably to assume migrations of ideas, passed externally from tribe to tribe, although evidence of these, recent and remote, is frequent enough; it is not sufficient to postulate merely the psychical unity of our common human nature, although this, too, is a factor which we should not neglect; but along with these we may reasonably conceive that the American race, through its long isolation, even in its most tenuously connected branches retains a certain deep communion of thought and feeling, a lasting participation in its own mode of insight and its own quest of inspiration, which unites it across the stretches of time and space. The arctic tern is said to summer in the two polar zones, arctic and antarctic, trued to its enormous flight by the most mystifying of all animal instincts. Perhaps it is some human instinct as profound and as mystifying which joins in one thought the scattered peoples of the two continents, charting in modes more subtle than their obvious forms can suggest the impulses which lead men to see their environmental world not as their physical eyes perceive it, but, belied by their eyes, as inner and whispering voices proclaim it to be.
NOTES
1. On the physical and ethnological conditions of tHe Chaco and the Abiponean districts the important authorities are Dobrizhoffer; Grubb [a], [b]; Koch, "Zur Ethnographic der Paraguay-Gebiete," in MitAGW xxxiii (1903); for the southern region important are, Voyages of the Adventure and the Beagle; the publications of the Mission scientifique du Cap Horn; Cooper, Analytical and Critical Bibliography of the Tribes of Tierra del Fuego and Adjacent Territory (dj BBE), with map; and El Norte de la Patagonia, with map, published by the Argentine Ministry of Public Works, Buenos Aires, 1914.
2. D'Orbigny, L'Homme americain, p. 233; J. Guevara, Historia, pp. 32, 265 (citing Fernandez, Relacion historial,- p. 39).
3. Dobrizhoffer, ii, ch. viii (pp. 57-59, 64-65 quoted); ch. x (p. 94 quoted).
4. Grubb [b], chh. xi, xii, xiv (pp. 139-41 quoted), xvi (p. 163 quoted) ; cf. Karsten, sections i, iii.
5. T. Guevara [a], i, ch. viii, "Los mitos y las ideas relijiosas de los Indies," pp. 223-25. Latcham, JAI xxxix, gives an account of Araucanian ideas, in general corresponding to Guevara, to whom he is apparently indebted.
6. Molina, ch. v (pp. 84, 86, 91 quoted).
7. Vicuna Cifuentes, especially sections vi-xi, xiv-xvi, xxi-xxiii. This work is particularly valuable in that it collects the statements of many authorities in regard to the creatures of Chilean folk-lore.
8. Dobrizhoffer, ii. 89-90.
9. The cosmogony is in Molina, ch. v; the tale of the two brothers in Lenz, p. 225.
10. Pigafetta, in The First Voyage Around the World by Magellan (HS, series i, 1874), PP- 5~55; the "Genoese Pilot," ib, p. 5.
11. Dobrizhoffer, ii. 89-90.
12. Prichard, pp. 85-86, 97-98. To Prichard's evidence may be added that of Captain R. N. Musters, another recent traveller, quoted by Church, Aborigines of South America, pp. 29495: "The religion of the Tehuelches is distinguished from that of the Araucanians and Pampas by the absence of any trace of sun worship. . . . There is no doubt that they do believe in a good Spirit, though they think he lives 'careless of mankind'"; Captain Musters regards the gualichu as a class of daemonic powers an altogether probable interpretation.
13. D'Orbigny, L'Homme americain, pp. 220, 225; Foyage of the Beagle, ii. 161-62; cf. also i, ch. vi.
14. Deniker [b] gives the myth of El-lal, after Lista.
15. Darwin, pp. 240-42; Bridges, in RevMP iii, p. 24.
16. Fitzroy, ch. ix, pp. 180-81.
17. Hyades and Deniker, ch. v, pp. 254-57.
18. Cooper, 63 BBE, pp. 145 ff., summarizes the scanty gleanings from the notes of travellers and missionaries touching Fuegian religious conceptions. The reference to the Salesian fathers (p. 147) is quoted from Cojazzi (p. 124); that to Captain Low is from Fitzroy (p. 190).
19. Cooper, op. cit., pp. 162-64, citing various authorities.
20. Despard, quoted by Cooper, op. cit. y p. 148.