Abaangui

The temple was an octagonal hut of palm thatch standing by itself in the forest, and what happened inside it was mostly drinking. Men came in naked and painted red with urucú, a crown of feathers in several colours on the head, a small stick pushed through the cartilage of the nose with feather tassels hung from either end, another through the lower lip. In the middle stood a great earthen jar of chicha with embers banked around it so the beer went down warm rather than cold. Each man took a pair of bamboo tacuaras, one in each hand, and sat on a long low log while the women stood behind them. The man leading drew on a big pipe and blew tobacco smoke over everyone in turn. Then the stamping began, and the singing, and the songs were for the Grandfather.

They called him Tamoi, the Grandfather, or Cheramoi, my Grandfather, and a Franciscan who spent thirty years among them recorded that they confused this figure entirely with the word they had for God. Tupa existed, they told him, but Tupa had nothing to do with the Guarayo. The Guarayo came from someone else, and that someone else had a name of his own. Abaangui. Cors translated it as the man of the fallen nose, and the story behind the translation is the strangest thing in the whole account.

At the start he was not a person. He was an indefinite something that wanted a shape, and he went about getting one the way a potter goes about a difficult commission, making a figure, disliking it, destroying it, starting again. The last shape he tried was a man’s. It came out well enough except for the nose, which was so grotesquely oversized that he swung a hand at it and knocked the thing clean off his face. The flattened result was what the Guarayo named him for, and it is the only physical detail anyone thought worth preserving.

The nose does not go into the sky. This needs saying plainly, because almost every English source will tell you that Abaangui was a moon god who cut off his nose and flung it upward to make the moon, and no version of the Guarayo record does anything of the kind. The moon in these stories is his son. The nose-into-the-sky reading appears to begin with the compiler dictionaries, Gertrude Jobes in 1962 and Coulter and Turner after her, and it has been copied outward from there ever since. It is an easy mistake to have made. In the missionary text the severed nose and the origin of the moon sit two paragraphs apart.

He had company. In one telling the world began as a mass of water out of which crawled a worm called mbir, stepping neatly along some little reeds, who decided by his own will to become a man and did, taking the name Mbiracucha. Zaguaguayu appeared next and picked a furious argument with him about who had the right to be seen first. Zaguaguayu was Abaangui’s brother, and a fourth figure called Candir made up the set. Between them the three who bothered to work at all pulled dry land out of the formless water and split it among their descendants, Mbiracucha’s going to the people of Brazil, Abaangui’s to the Guarayo, Candir’s to Black people. Cors, who was writing all this down in order to replace it, noted honestly that his informants had by then fed the story of Noah and his three sons into their own, and it shows.

Then Abaangui got hungry. He and his wife, whose origin nobody could account for, had been living on a sour little fruit called cama à pu, so he made yuca, maize and plantain, and when the yuca ripened he sent her out with a carrying basket and taught her how to turn it into cangui. He drank the result until he could not stand, and beat her nearly to death, and when he sobered up he approved of what he had done and said he wanted his grandchildren to do the same. The missionary who copied this passage added a line of his own about how faithfully they had obeyed. He was not an impartial witness and he was not pretending to be one. His summary of the god’s entire career runs: he drank a lot of chicha, beat his wife a lot, and passed over to the promised land.

The Grandfather’s two sons are nameless in the record, but what they did survived. They shot an arrow into the sky, then a second into the notch of the first, then another and another until a chain of arrows hung down to the ground, and they climbed it. At the top one became the Sun and the other the Moon. The Moon kept coming back down at night to a Guaraya woman, disguised so well that she never knew him, until she blacked her palm with soot from a cooking pot and stroked his face while he lay there. The next night he rose smudged, and he has not been able to wash it off since.

Eventually the brothers separated. Zaguaguayu went east and kept going to the end of the world, arriving at a place with no sun and no sky at all, lit only by small birds, where he stayed by himself. Abaangui went west until he found a country he liked, where the yuca grows superb, and there he built a city and settled in with his grandchildren for good. Every Guarayo who died went to join him. The body was washed, oiled, painted, crowned with feathers, turned to face the setting sun, and sent off with a gourd of chicha in the right hand, a bundle of reeds in the left, bow, arrows and a few sweet canes as a present for the old man.

The road was not easy. A great vulture waited across the path to check whether the traveller’s lower lip, nose and ears had been properly pierced in life, and hauled off anyone who had neglected it. Two enormous stones stood clashing together forever, and had to be shouted at, because they were intelligent and would hold still for a firm voice but would grind a silent man into the ground. There were rivers, and a raft at one of them that floated for the good and sank for the bad. What waited at the end of it was a garden in permanent spring with birds in the trees, gardens to work, children to have, dancing, and drink that never ran out. The greeting is recorded in Guarayu. The Grandfather asks, have you come, then, and did you come because you wanted to, and the answer is yes, I always said I wanted to go and see my Grandfather, and because I thought of you I am here.

His powers stop at the edge of his own country. He is not a sky god and commands no weather, no thunder, no season. He does not judge, exactly; the vulture and the raft do that. When the flood came, the record says, the three world-makers saved themselves the way anyone else would have, one climbing into a round gourd, one going up a palm, one turning himself into a raven. The manuscript that preserves all this has nothing at all to say about how Abaangui himself made the crossing to the west, whether he died first or simply went, and the missionaries who asked the question of the most articulate converts they could find reported that not one of them could answer it.

He was still dangerous long after he was supposed to have been retired. In the nineteenth century a Guarayo named Luis invoked his Grandfather Abaangui and the old traditions to talk mission converts into walking out and going back to the forest, more than once. The prefect who recorded the episode also recorded, with some unease, that he could see several more old men around him made of the same material.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Abaangui?

Abaangui is the ancestral creator and Grandfather of the Guarayo, a Guaraní-speaking people of eastern Bolivia. He shaped himself into a man after several failed attempts, made the land the Guarayo live on, and gave them yuca, maize, plantain and chicha. The Guarayo called him Tamoi, the Grandfather, or Cheramoi, my Grandfather.

Did Abaangui really cut off his nose to make the moon?

No. This is the most widely repeated claim about him and it is not in the Guarayo record. Abaangui knocked off his own nose because the human shape he was building came out with an absurdly oversized one, and the story ends there. The Moon in Guarayo tradition is one of his two sons, who climbed into the sky on a ladder of arrows.

What does the name Abaangui mean?

The Franciscan José Cors, who recorded the mythology in the mid-nineteenth century, translated it as “the man of the fallen nose”, from aba (man), a (nose) and ngui (fallen or knocked down). The name is a description of the accident that finished his self-creation.

Where do the Guarayo dead go?

They go west, to the city Abaangui built for himself in a country where the yuca grows superb, and they live there with him permanently. Bodies were laid out facing the setting sun and equipped with chicha, weapons and a gift of sweet cane for the journey. The road there is guarded by a vulture that inspects the traveller’s pierced lip, nose and ears, by two clashing stones, and by a raft that sinks under anyone who was bad in life.

Who are Zaguaguayu, Mbiracucha and Candir?

They are the other three figures of Guarayo cosmology. Mbiracucha began as a worm and turned himself into a man by his own will; Zaguaguayu was Abaangui’s brother, who went east to a lightless place at the end of the world and stayed there alone; Candir is the fourth and has almost no story attached to him. Together with Abaangui they divided the newly made land among their descendants.

Related Entries

Jasy, Tupã, Karai, Jasy Jatere, Pombero, Kurupi, Guaraci, Jaci, Viracocha, Amalivaca, Bochica, Noah