Amalivaca

Also Known As: also written Amalivacá in Gilij’s Tamanaco transcription, and Amalivaka in some later Venezuelan retellings
Region/Culture: South America
Mythos: Venezuelan Mythology, Indigenous South American Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He shapes the land after the flood, cuts the figures into the rock faces of the middle Orinoco, and holds the power to grant or withdraw human immortality with a sentence.
Role in Mythos: He is the father and maker of the Tamanaco, the being who arrives when the water goes down and makes the drowned world habitable again.
Relation to Humans: He lived among the Tamanaco for a long time at a place called Maita, taught them, and left behind a house and a drum that can still be visited. He also took their eternal life away in a fit of temper, which the Tamanaco blamed not on him but on one old woman who doubted him out loud.

Two blocks of granite sit one on top of the other on a savanna in the far northeast of the Serranía de la Encaramada, in what is now Bolívar state, Venezuela. Strike the wedges where they meet and the upper block rings. It is not the flat knock of one rock hit against another. The sound spreads out across the grass with the long carrying tone of a bell, and the people who live within earshot of it have never called it anything but a drum. It belonged, they will tell you, to Amalivaca.

He was the great culture hero of the Tamanaco, a Carib-speaking people of the middle Orinoco who lived north of the Cuchivero river and who are now gone. In 1749 a Jesuit from Italy named Felipe Salvador Gilij founded the mission of San Luis de La Encaramada on the Guaya where it meets the Orinoco, and the Tamanaco were brought there. Gilij stayed eighteen years, learned their language well enough to argue in it, and wrote down what they told him about the beginning of things. By then there were around a hundred and twenty-five of them left.

What they told him started with water. In the old times of our elders, they said, the whole earth sank under the water. Gilij asked who survived and they said two people, a man and a woman, and no, the story does not give their names. He asked where the Tamanaco had been when it happened. In those days our elders were in the country near the river Cuchivero, they said, and the two who came through the flood stayed on a mountain called Tamanacu that stands on its bank.

Amalivaca came in on a boat while the water was still high. Half a century later Alexander von Humboldt, working from Gilij’s book and from talks with the missionary at La Urbana, wrote the arrival as an ocean breaking against the hills of Encaramada during what the Tamanaco called the time of the waters. Humboldt also said that Amalivaca carved the sun and the moon into the painted rock of Encaramada, and that particular detail is Humboldt’s, not Gilij’s. Gilij had walked the eight miles out to that rock himself, expecting something memorable, and came back distinctly unimpressed. Coarse lines scratched long ago with a stone, he wrote, with no appearance of letters about them. The Tamanaco gave them no meaning at all. They only said that a certain Amalivaca had made them, and that they held him to be their god.

He did not work alone. He had a brother, Uochí in the Tamanaco, Vochi in most of what has been written since, and between them they made the world, the country and the people in it. Then they came to the Orinoco and stopped. The two of them stood over that river for a long while trying to work out how to make it run upstream and downstream at once, so that a man in a canoe would have the current behind him whichever way he was going and nobody would ever have to fight the water home. They talked it through. They could not do it, and in the end they let it go. The river runs one way. Every paddler on the Orinoco since has been paying for that failure.

He was a hard father. His daughters were forever wandering off, so he broke their legs to keep them where they were and make them populate the Tamanaco country. He levelled the ground until it was fit to live on. He knew music. On the plain of Maita he had a house, which is a rough outcrop with boulders heaped at the top of it into a sort of cave, and the Tamanaco called it Amalivacá-yeutitpe, the house where Amalivacá lived. The drum stood on the road nearby.

Then he decided to go home. He got into his canoe to cross back over the sea he had come from, the sea where the souls of the dead go, and before he pushed off he spoke to the people on the bank in a voice that was not his usual one. You will change only your skin, he said. It was a promise of endless life, the kind snakes and lizards have, one body sloughed and a new one underneath. An old woman standing there let out a single syllable, a small unimpressed sound, and it was enough. He turned round and said, flatly and in his own voice, you will die. Then he left. Ever afterwards the Tamanaco held that human beings are perishable because one old woman could not keep her doubt to herself.

They also believed he was still alive over there. Gilij records that they used to ask him whether he had run into Amalivaca, since the priest also claimed to have come from somewhere on the other side of the sea.

His powers are the powers of a maker who arrives late, after the damage. He can raise and flatten ground, cut stone, set a people down in a place and fix them there, and put a shape on the world that outlasts him in rock hard enough to still be photographed. His limits are just as clear and rather more interesting. He could not make a river run two ways. He could not make his own gift stick against one woman’s scepticism, and he was too proud to take the retraction back. And he was not the kind of god who stays. The Tamanaco were left with a levelled country, some marks on a cliff, a stone that rings, and death.

Everything above comes from one priest’s notebooks. Humboldt read Gilij and expanded him. When the ethnographer Walter Roth went looking in British Guiana in 1915, expecting to find Amalivaca alive among the Caribs of the Pomeroon district, he could get nothing first-hand at all, and reported that the name itself appeared to be unknown there. In the meantime Amalivaca had been adopted at home. Arístides Rojas put him into his Leyendas históricas de Venezuela, later writers gave him a cavern and a tidy sequence of events that Gilij never mentions, and César Rengifo set him in glass mosaic on a wall in Caracas. Guyanese versions move him to the Essequibo and hand him a diamond to carve with. The Tamanaco language is dead and cannot arbitrate any of it. What survives from the people themselves is a handful of sentences, two place names, an argument about a river, and an old woman who said the wrong thing at the water’s edge.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Amalivaca?

Amalivaca is the creator and culture hero of the Tamanaco, a Carib-speaking people who lived on the middle Orinoco in what is now Bolívar state, Venezuela. He arrived by boat while the waters of the great flood were still high and remade the world afterwards, working alongside his brother Vochi. The Tamanaco regarded him as their god and their father.

What did Amalivaca do to the Orinoco?

Amalivaca and his brother Vochi tried to make the Orinoco flow upstream and downstream at the same time, so that canoe travellers would always have the current with them. They discussed it at length and could not manage it, so they abandoned the attempt. It is one of the few myths in which a creator simply gives up on a job.

Why did the Tamanaco lose eternal life?

As Amalivaca was leaving in his canoe he told the Tamanaco they would only change their skin, meaning they would renew themselves forever like animals that shed. An old woman listening on the bank made a doubting noise, and Amalivaca angrily changed his pronouncement to say that they would die instead. The Tamanaco blamed human mortality on her disbelief rather than on him.

Where is Amalivaca’s drum?

It is a large rock on the plain of Maita, near the northeast end of the Serranía de la Encaramada in Bolívar state, Venezuela, close to the outcrop the Tamanaco called Amalivaca’s house. It is formed of two great blocks of stone stacked one on the other, and striking it produces a ringing tone that carries across the savanna. Both features were recorded in the eighteenth century and were relocated by Venezuelan researchers in 1978.

Who wrote the Amalivaca myth down?

Almost everything known about Amalivaca comes from the Jesuit missionary Felipe Salvador Gilij, who lived among the Tamanaco at the La Encaramada mission from 1749 to 1767 and published his account in his Ensayo de historia americana. Alexander von Humboldt later expanded on Gilij and added details of his own, including the claim that Amalivaca carved the sun and moon into the painted rock. Later Venezuelan and Guyanese retellings added considerably more.