Guiana story of Beginnings!

HOW PAIN, MISERY, AND DEATH CAME INTO THE WORLD – Guiana

In the olden times, there was no contention, all were happy, and no one became sick or died. It was then that the Yurokons used to come and live among us as our friends and associates; they were short people like ourselves. One Yurokon in particular used to come and drink paiwarri with my people, whom he would visit for the purpose regularly once a month. The last time he came, he appeared as a woman with a baby at the breast. The Caribs gave her of the pepper-pot, into which she dipped the cassava, which she then sucked and ate. The pepper-pot was so hot, however, that it burned the inside of her mouth and "heart," and this made her ask for water, but her hostess told her that she had none. 

Yurokon therefore asked for a calabash, and leaving her baby up at the house, she went down to the waterside, where she quenched her thirst. On her return, she looked for her little child, but it was nowhere to be seen: she searched high and low, but all in vain, because during her absence some worthless woman among the company had thrown it into the boiling cassiri pot. By and by Yurokon went to stir the cassiri with the usual paddle-spoon, and, while she stirred, the body of her baby rose to the surface. She wept, and then, turning on the people, upbraided them: "Why have you punished me in this way? I have never had a bad mind against any of you, but now I will make you pay me. In future your children shall all die, and this will make you weep as I am weeping. And when children are born to you, you shall suffer pain and trouble at their birth. Furthermore, with regard to you men," continued Yurokon, as she addressed the male members of the company, "I will give you great trouble when you go out to catch fish." 

And so she did, because in those days we Caribs only had to go to the waterside, bail the water out with our calabashes, and picking up the fish that were left exposed at the bottom of the stream, just put the water back again to breed fish once more. Yurokon altered all this, and made us go to the trouble, annoyance, and inconvenience of poisoning the pools with various roots. What is more, Yurokon killed the worthless Indian who had thrown her boy into the cassiri, and then asked her children what had become of their mother. 

"She has gone to the field," they said. 

"No, she has not; she is hunting after genitalia unius personæ tribus meæ," was the insulting rejoinder, a reply which she purposely gave in order to provoke them into a rage. She asked them the same question a second time, and they told her she had gone to bake cassava. 

"No, she has not," replied Yurokon; "she has bored her way into my ear," an answer supposed to be even more offensive. And she asked them the same question a third time, but on this occasion they told her that she had gone to dig sweet potatoes. As soon as they mentioned the word "potatoes," Yurokon disappeared 

The general tendency of these Spirits, however, is to do bad, the degree of wickedness of which they can be guilty varying with p.180 circumstances and locality. Such a Spirit for instance may "be believed in simply as a mischievous imp, who is at the bottom of all those mishaps of their daily life, the causes of which are not very immediate or obvious to their dull understandings" (HWB, 381). When in the manufacture of their native drinks anything goes wrong with the fermentation, the Indians ascribe it to Spirit machinations. The following Warrau story is illustrative of this belief.


WHY THE DRINK TURNED SOUR

A man went one day to visit some neighbors, but, when he arrived there, found they were all out: as it was already too late in the afternoon to allow of his getting home again before nightfall, he made arrangements to sleep there and return the following morning. He drew himself up on the manicole rafters and turned in. But before I go any further I must tell you that in this house there was a big jar in which drink was being prepared in anticipation of next day's festivities when the house-master, his family, and relatives would have returned. 

Our friend had not been long on the manicole flooring before he saw a lot of Hebus enter the place, and have a look round. He heard them say, "Hullo! here is some drink. Let us bathe first, and then come and taste it. It were a pity to let it spoil." 

So they all went and washed their skins, and then returned for a good carousal. But when they started drinking, they felt the want of some music, and so they arranged with a labba to play for them. All the tune it could play was its usual grunt, but they were quite satisfied with it, and really enjoyed their dance. Our friend watched them until daybreak, when they took their departure, the little labba tree sneaking away behind a plantain tree. 

Later on, the household returned, and said, just as the Spirits did: "Let us bathe first and then drink. It were a pity to let it spoil." But the watcher warned them not to touch the liquor because he had kept awake during the night, and had seen the Hebus sipping it. They therefore threw all the drink away. 

Now, among the household was a widow, who exclaimed: "Yes. I knew that the Hebus were going to spoil our drink." And when asked how she knew, she told them that she had received a sign, or token, because when she was weeping for her late husband, he suddenly appeared before her and told her to cease to cry.

If an Indian loses his way in the forest, the Spirit is the cause. The Caribs, however, know how to circumvent the latter, by making a string puzzle, which is left on the pathway: the object of this puzzle consists in removing, without cutting or breaking, an endless string from off two sticks upon which it has been placed (see fig. 1). The Spirit coming along sees the puzzle, starts examining it, and tries to get the string off: indeed, so engrossed with it does he become, that he forgets all about the wanderer, who is now free to find the p. 181 road again. In this connection, it is interesting to note that Bates speaks of his Indian boy, on the lower Amazon, making a charm to protect them from the Curupari: "For this purpose he took a young palm-leaf, plaited it, and formed it into a ring which he hung to a branch on our track" (HWB, 35).1

On the Orinoco, the Mapoyes blamed the Spirits of the Forest for damage to their fields, the Guayquiries held them responsible for all their strifes and disputes, the Guamos ascribed sickness to their occult powers, while the Betoyes regarded them as the cause of the deaths of all their children whose necks they broke so silently as not to be felt (G, II, 23-26). This belief in their being the cause of sickness and death is universal throughout the Guianas. Among the Arawaks it is the Yawahu-shimara, or Spirit's Arrow, which has the property of inflicting pains or ills, the visible causes of which are not discoverable. The Arawaks, however, are not alone in this conception: it is apparently shared by the Caribs, from whom I learned the following:

Walter E. Roth,An Inquiry into the Animism and Folk-Lore of the Guiana Indians, Walter E. Roth, from the Thirtieth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1908-1909, pp. 103-386, Washington D.C., 1915, and is now in the public domain.[ British Guiana ][ South America ]

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