Arasy

Also Known As: a Guaraní name built from ara, sky or day, and sy, mother; her author gives her the title Madre del Cielo, Mother of Heaven, and ties her name to arasa, the guava
Region/Culture: South America
Mythos: Guarani Mythology, Literary Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: Arasy is the moon-dwelling Mother of Heaven who helps Tupã make the world, names the first woman, and lays the curse that fills the land with monsters.
Role in Mythos: She is the wife of Tupã and the co-creator of the first human pair in Ñande Ypy Kuéra, the Guaraní genesis poem published by the Paraguayan writer Narciso R. Colmán in 1929.
Relation to Humans: Arasy names Sypavê, the first woman, calls her born of herself and in her likeness, and gives her the guava as her own fruit. She is also the one the people pray to when Taû carries off Kerana, and she answers them with a curse.

The moon in Narciso R. Colmán’s poem is white and faintly shining, like a gigantic tuft of cotton, and a goddess lives on it. Her name is Arasy. Tupã marries her at the start of everything, crowns her Mother of Heaven and gives her the moon for a house, and one cool, bright morning the pair come down to a hill called Arigua, the place Paraguayans now call Areguá, to build a world. That is the whole of her record: one book, Ñande Ypy Kuéra, “Our Ancestors”, which Colmán published in verse in 1929 and in a prose version in 1937. No telling of Arasy older than his has come to light.

Colmán signed himself Rosicrán. He was born at Yvytymi in 1880 and died in Asunción in 1954, and he wrote his genesis of the Guaraní people as a poem. The Paraguayan Guaraní writer David Galeano Olivera says it plainly: the poem is a product of Colmán’s imagination, and above all of his own reading of oddly shaped stones he found in a cave on Cerro Tatukua. For the Guaraní’s own account of the beginning, Galeano points readers elsewhere, to León Cadogan’s Ayvu Rapyta, the sacred texts of the Mbyá. Arasy is a poet’s goddess.

Inside the poem, she earns her title. After the wedding, Tupã and Arasy set about making the world from that hilltop, and then they turn to people. They take clay and work into it the juice of ka’a ruvicha, the blood of a bird called the yvyja’u, the leaves of sensitive plants and an insect called the ambu’a, and they lay the figures out in the sun. The clay warms and dries and wakes. Tupã names the man Rupavê. Arasy speaks to the woman: you who were born of me, in my likeness, I name you Sypavê.

Then comes the first disagreement of the marriage. Tupã is inclined to give the new pair an easy life. Arasy cuts him off. If they do nothing, she says, if they never work, they may end up miserable, because a life that is always pleasant and easy is not life but a slow death. She wins the argument. When the gifts are handed out, she keeps one back for Sypavê: the fruit of the guava tree, the arasa, whose name, she points out, sounds so much like her own. Somewhere in that sentence is a poet enjoying his own pun.

Her great scene comes later, and it is not gentle. Taû, the spirit of evil in Colmán’s cosmos, carries off the girl Kerana. The people go to Arasy with prayers and pleas for an exemplary punishment of the abductor. The goddess listens, and her own anger breaks out as a terrible curse on Taû. The curse keeps the moon’s time. Seven full moons later, Kerana gives birth to her first monster, and six more follow, among them the dog-lizard Teju Jagua, the serpents Mbói Tu’ĩ and Moñái, and the Luison. The cursed brood is the part of the poem most people now know.

Retold in English, Arasy tends to lose her author. Online encyclopedias present her as the Guaraní moon goddess and wife of Tupã, citing reference books such as David Leeming’s Creation Myths of the World (2010), and Colmán’s name falls out of the sentence. That matters, because the Guaraní record and the poem pull in different directions. In the older sources Tupã is a thunder power whose name Jesuit missionaries borrowed for the Christian God, and the moon is Jasy, a male twin of the sun. Colmán’s married couple on the sun and the moon is his own design.

What Arasy can do, she does inside the book: she creates alongside Tupã, gives the first woman her name and her fruit, argues for work over ease, and turns a whole people’s grief into a curse that reshapes the country. Her power reaches as far as her one author took it. Nothing is recorded of her parents, her age, any temple or offering, or any end, and no village is known to have prayed to her outside the pages of Ñande Ypy Kuéra. She lives on a cotton-white moon, in a poem written in the twentieth century, and in the name of a guava.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Arasy in Guaraní mythology?

Arasy is the wife of Tupã and the Mother of Heaven in Ñande Ypy Kuéra, a Guaraní genesis poem by the Paraguayan writer Narciso R. Colmán, published in 1929. In the poem she lives on the moon, helps Tupã make the world, and names the first woman, Sypavê.

Is Arasy an ancient Guaraní goddess?

No earlier source for Arasy than Colmán’s 1929 poem has been found. The Paraguayan writer David Galeano Olivera describes the poem as a product of Colmán’s imagination and of his reading of stones he found in a cave on Cerro Tatukua. English retellings that call Arasy an ancient moon goddess usually leave Colmán out.

What did Arasy create?

In Ñande Ypy Kuéra, Arasy and Tupã come down to a hill at Areguá and make the world, then shape the first humans from clay mixed with plant juice, bird blood, leaves and an insect. Tupã names the man Rupavê and Arasy names the woman Sypavê.

What is Arasy’s curse on Taû?

When Taû, the spirit of evil in Colmán’s poem, abducts the girl Kerana, the people pray to Arasy for his punishment and she lays a terrible curse on him. Seven full moons later Kerana gives birth to the first of seven monstrous sons, among them Teju Jagua, Mbói Tu’ĩ, Moñái and the Luison.

Why is Arasy linked to the guava?

In Colmán’s poem Arasy gives the first woman, Sypavê, the fruit of the guava tree, called arasa in Guaraní. Arasy remarks that the fruit’s name sounds very like her own.