Guaraci

Also Known As: also Guaracy, Coaraci, Quaraci; from Tupi kuarasy, the sun; the southern Tupi, the Guarani, say cuaracy, Kuaray or Kuarahy
Region/Culture: South America
Mythos: Native Brazilian Mythology, Guarani Mythology, Brazilian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He is the sun itself, named in a nineteenth-century reconstruction as the creator of humankind and of every living creature, with the moon set beside him as the maker of all that grows.
Role in Mythos: He is the first of the three great gods in the Tupi theogony assembled by Couto de Magalhaes in 1876, and, under the Guarani name Kuaray, the demiurge who built the present earth and alone may end it.
Relation to Humans: The sun is the being who made people and who sustains them simply by rising, so the sentiment owed to him was said to be the sentiment owed to a mother. His withdrawal, in the Guarani telling, is the end of the world.

Before the light comes over the trees there is a moment on the Amazon when the river is the colder thing. Mist sits on the brown water. Then the edge of the sun clears the canopy and the heat arrives all at once, hard on the back of the neck, and the mist is gone. In the language the Tupi were speaking when the Portuguese came ashore, there was no separate name for the being who did this. The sun and the word for the sun were one and the same, and the word was coaracy.

That should have been the end of it. Instead the word acquired a god, the god acquired a biography, and the biography can be traced to one man, one book, and a single page he carefully hedged.

The book is O Selvagem, published in Rio de Janeiro in 1876 by Jose Vieira Couto de Magalhaes: soldier, provincial president, traveller of the Araguaia, collector of languages from the interior. Deep inside it, under a heading he set in capitals, Nomenclatura dos Deuses Tupis, sits the line that has been quoted, translated, rewritten and monetised ever since. Guaracy, sol. This god created man and the living things. Around it he sketched an entire architecture: three superior deities, the sun who made everything that breathes, the moon who made everything that grows, and Peruda, also called Ruda, the god of love, whose office was to see that created things went on reproducing. Below them a lesser god for every genus the Indians recognised, and below those, one for every species.

It is an elegant system. Couto de Magalhaes knew it was too elegant. The sentence introducing it does not say this is the Tupi theogony. It says the general system of the Tupi theogony appears to be this. A few pages on, weighing another matter, he allowed that anything was possible but that for the moment it amounted to no more than simple conjecture. He was guessing, in good faith, from vocabulary and fragments and a couple of decades of listening on the rivers, and he said so.

Nobody carried the hedge forward. They carried Guaraci.

The name has a joke buried in it that almost nobody repeats. In a footnote he concedes that etymologies are treacherous in languages that were never written down, then works this one out anyway: the northern Tupi say guaracy, the southerners, the Guarani, say cuaracy, and the ending is the same in both. Sy means mother. Guara carries the sense of dweller, of living thing, of being. So the name of the male creator of everything alive resolves, on his own reading, to mother of the living. The god is masculine. The word is not.

What the Guarani themselves say about the sun is a different story, and a better one.

It was first written down in Guarani by Curt Nimuendaju, a German who arrived in Brazil in 1903, took an indigenous name, spent five years among the Nandeva and published the legend of the twins in Berlin in 1914. Sun and Moon are brothers there. Both are male. Their mother, pregnant and walking a forest road, reaches for a flower the child in her belly has asked for, is stung by a bee inside it, strikes her own stomach in temper, and is not told the way again. The road she takes instead ends at the house of the jaguars. An old jaguar warns her to be gone before her sons come home. She stays.

The brothers are raised by the animal that ate their mother. A parrot tells them the truth of it. They build a bridge over water, wait until the jaguars are out on it, and drop them in. Not all of them drown. That failure is why there are still jaguars in the forest, and it matters, because the sun of this story is not a being who always wins. Afterwards the two of them walk, naming the plants and the animals as they go, giving names even to the foods, and only when the walking is finished do they climb into the sky and divide the lighting of the world between them.

Among the Mbya today the sun is Kuaray, which is another name for Nhamandu, and he is the one who built the earth now underfoot after the first one was destroyed. Everyone helped, but the design was his. He is also the only one permitted to end it. He said as much at the time, and the arrangement has held.

Set that beside the tale most Brazilians grow up with, in which Guaraci wakes, sees the moon Jaci for the first time, falls in love, and can never reach her, because the opening of his eyes is the very thing that sends her off to rest, so that Ruda must fly between them carrying words. It is a lovely story. It is also not an old one. There is no romance anywhere in Couto de Magalhaes; his sun and moon are two workmen with separate portfolios. The Guarani record makes the arrangement stranger and stricter still, because there the moon is not a woman the sun cannot have. The moon is his younger brother.

Nothing in any of this says what Guaraci looks like. No face, no chariot, no gold, no crown of rays. The sources that name him hand him powers and a genealogy and no body at all, which is the honest outcome, given that what the Tupi actually had in front of them was the sun. His portrait is the light. It is there in the hour-names built around him, coaracy iuate for the high sun near noon, in the shadow shortening on packed earth outside a longhouse, in the particular exhaustion of a river crossing made at three in the afternoon because the alternative was to travel by night, steering on the stars and the call of the inambu.

His powers follow plainly. He makes living things and keeps them alive by the simple fact of being present. He names them, in the version where he walks. He can build a world, and he can withdraw from one, and the withdrawal is the end of everything, which means the light that feeds the forest is the one force capable of finishing it.

The limits follow too. He is not the whole of heaven, only its day half, and he hands the sky over every evening to the brother he is supposed to be pining for. He cannot finish the jaguars; some of them always swim clear. And the hardest limit is not in the myth at all but in the paperwork. Take away one hedged page from 1876 and there is no Guaraci left standing, only a word for the sun, doing what a word for the sun does.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Guaraci?

Guaraci is the sun in Tupi and Guarani tradition, presented in Brazilian popular mythology as a sun god and the creator of every living creature. The name comes straight from the Tupi word for the sun, kuarasy, and the divine biography attached to it was assembled by the Brazilian writer and traveller Couto de Magalhaes in his 1876 book O Selvagem.

Did the Tupi really worship a god called Guaraci?

The Tupi word coaracy simply means the sun, and the systematic pantheon in which Guaraci is the supreme creator was a reconstruction. Couto de Magalhaes proposed it in 1876 as three superior deities, the sun, the moon and Peruda or Ruda, and he wrote plainly that this was how the system appeared to him and amounted to conjecture. The hedge was dropped by everyone who repeated him.

Is Guaraci in love with Jaci, the moon?

The famous romance, in which Guaraci loves Jaci but can never meet her and sends Ruda between them with messages, is a modern Brazilian story and appears in none of the early sources. In the Guarani record collected by Curt Nimuendaju in 1914 the sun and the moon are twin brothers, both male, so there is no romance for them to be kept from.

What is the difference between Guaraci and Kuarahy Jara?

They are the same sun approached from two directions. Guaraci is the Brazilian, Tupi-derived name and the god of the nineteenth-century reconstruction, while Kuaray or Kuarahy is the sun of the living Guarani twin cycle, elder brother of the moon, avenger of his mother and, among the Mbya, the maker of the present earth.

What did Guaraci create?

In the Tupi theogony set out in O Selvagem, Guaraci as the sun created humankind and all animal life, while the moon created everything that grows from the soil and Ruda was charged with reproduction. In the Guarani twin cycle the sun’s creative work is different: he and his brother give names to the plants, the animals and the foods as they travel, and the sun builds the world that came after the first one was destroyed.