Jurupari

Under a certain stretch of the Vaupés River, weighted down in the dark where the current runs slow, lie long trumpets and flutes cut from paxiúba palm. Between ceremonies they stay there, drowned on purpose. When the men bring them up and blow, the sound is low and enormous, the roar of anaconda and jaguar braided into one note, and it is not called music. It is called the voice of Jurupari, and any woman or child who so much as sees the instruments that make it can be killed for the looking.

He is the culture hero of the northwest Amazon, known across the Tupi-Guarani, Tucano, and Arawak peoples of the rivers that stitch Brazil and Colombia together. The Arawakans call him Kowai, the Tucanoans have their own names, and the trade-language word that travelled furthest is the one the missionaries would later fasten on. He is the son of the sun. His business on earth was law.

His beginning is a chain of strange conceptions. The stories open with a plague that carried off nearly all the men, leaving a handful of elders and a single surviving shaman, and with the women gathering at a lake where the star-goddess Ceucy, who is the Pleiades, came down to bathe. The old shaman was there among them, unseen, and he punished the women for trespassing on the water and fathered children on all of them. Among the newborns was a girl so lovely she too was named Ceucy, after the star. Years later, still a virgin, she ate a forbidden fruit from the mapati tree, and its juice quickened her. The son she bore looked like the sun himself. The people made him their chief and called him Jurupari, a name read as the one who covers the mouth, because the men would keep the secrets of his cult behind sealed lips.

What he looked like depends on which teller catches you. In the founding legend he is a young man as radiant as his father, beautiful enough that a whole people ran to crown him. In the grimmer versions collected along the upper Rio Negro he is something else: a creature with the body of a monkey and a human face, hands, and feet, born with no mouth, fed on tobacco smoke because he could not eat, and when a mouth was at last cut into him he loosed a sound that came out of every opening in his body at once. Both are him. The god and the monster are the same figure seen from opposite ends of the same story.

In the ordinary running of the cult he is the law made audible. Boys of twelve to fifteen are led into the longhouse, shown the flutes they have heard all their lives without ever seeing, given coca and snuff and the bitter drink yagé, and whipped with ritual switches to make them grow strong. When it is finished they may hunt, marry, and sit in the decisions of the village. That is Jurupari at his daily work, turning children into men through fear and knowledge held just out of reach.

The central myth is harsher than a coming-of-age. Jurupari grew with terrible speed into a shaman leader and laid down a regime of fasts and prohibitions. Once, while a party of initiated boys were still bound by his taboos, he took them into the forest to gather uacú fruit, and the boys, hungry, roasted and ate it against his rule. He answered with a thunderstorm. They bolted for shelter into what they took to be a cave, and the cave was his mouth. He swallowed all but one of them and rose into the sky, and the lone survivor carried the news home.

The parents wanted him dead. They coaxed him back with beer, each batch stranger than the last, until they offered him one he had never tasted, and he came, knowing precisely what they intended and telling them flatly that fire was the only thing on earth that could kill him. He arrived at dusk, brought the swallowed boys back up as bones, and danced and drank through the whole night. At first light they threw him onto the fire. The blaze that rose was the first slash-and-burn clearing, and as he burned he promised that he would live forever and that all other men, from then on, would die.

From his ashes grew the first paxiúba palm, and with it the vines, the snakes, the stinging ants, and the skin-shedding creatures that came from his softer parts, while the palm itself came from his bones. Squirrels cut the palm into sections, and those sections, shared out among the peoples, became the paired flutes and the separate voices of the clans. His breath still moves through them. The sound the women may not see is, quite literally, a dead god’s bones being blown across.

There is a reason the ban falls on women above all. The flutes were not always the men’s. The sun told his son to carry them down to the river and play them at dawn, but the son’s sister woke first, found the instruments, and ran off with them, and for a time the women held all the ritual power while the men were left to menstruate and break the ground. The men took the flutes back by force, drove the women into submission with whips and shrill piston whistles, and set down the death penalty that has guarded the instruments ever since. The cult is a story about a world once ruled by women and now ruled, deliberately, by men.

When the first Europeans reached these rivers, his was the most widespread cult they found, and the Catholic missionaries set about breaking it by naming him the Devil. The renaming took well enough that a second Jurupari grew up beside the first, a spirit of darkness who slips into sleepers and pins them beneath nightmares, flooding them with dread while sealing their throats so they cannot cry out, now and then until they smother. The folklorist Câmara Cascudo judged this nightmare-Jurupari a European and African creature dressed in an Amazonian name. It sounds a great deal like sleep paralysis. The Jesuits may have half-made it, and a people wanting some reason for their bad dreams took it in.

His powers are those of a lawmaker who is also a force of nature. He fathers the useful and the poisonous plants out of his own scattered body, calls down the storm, swallows the living and gives them back, and holds an entire society in the grip of one unbreakable rule. He is immortal, his soul lodged among the stars of Orion while his flute-bones go on speaking below. His weaknesses are few and exact. Fire could undo his body, and he named it himself before he walked into it. Beer and his own vanity drew him back into the hands of his killers. And the whole order he built rests on a secret, which means it can never be stronger than the silence kept around the flutes, and the moment a woman sees them the architecture begins to fall, which is the plain reason the price of looking is death.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Jurupari?

Jurupari is a culture hero and god of the indigenous Tupi-Guarani, Tucano, and Arawak peoples of the northwest Amazon in Brazil and Colombia. Said to be born of the sun, he established the laws of ritual and society, above all a secret men’s initiation cult whose sacred flutes are believed to carry his voice.

Why are the Jurupari flutes forbidden to women?

In the myth, ritual power once belonged to women, who stole the sacred flutes and ruled until the men seized them back by force. To keep that reversal from ever happening again, Jurupari’s law decreed that any woman or child who sees the flutes must be killed, and the instruments are hidden underwater between ceremonies so that only initiated men may look upon them.

How was Jurupari killed?

After Jurupari swallowed a group of initiated boys who had broken his taboos, their parents lured him back with ever more exotic beer and threw him onto a fire, the one thing he had said could kill him. As he burned he declared that he would remain immortal while all other men would now die, and from his ashes grew the first paxiúba palm used to make the sacred flutes.

What are the Jurupari flutes made of?

The Jurupari flutes and bark trumpets are cut from the trunk of the paxiúba palm, which the myth says grew from Jurupari’s burned bones. Their deep, resonant sound imitates the roar of the ancestral anaconda and jaguar and is understood to be the voice of the god himself, played at male initiation rites of the Tukano, Tariana, and related Amazon peoples.

Why do some traditions call Jurupari a devil or demon?

When Catholic missionaries encountered the widespread Jurupari cult in the sixteenth century, they deliberately identified him with the Christian Devil to discourage his worship. This gave rise to a darker figure, a spirit of darkness who visits sleepers with suffocating nightmares, which the folklorist Câmara Cascudo regarded as a European and African idea grafted onto the Amazonian name.

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