Makonaima

Also Known As: also Makunaima, Makunaimö, Makonáima, Mackonaima; Brazilian Portuguese Macunaíma; glossed by William Hilhouse in 1832 as “one that works in the dark”
Region/Culture: South America
Mythos: Guyanese Mythology, Indigenous South American Mythology, Venezuelan Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He is the great transformer of the Cariban highlands, who turns people and animals into stone, makes the game animals and the fish, and builds humanity a second time after fire has destroyed the first.
Role in Mythos: He plants the tree that feeds the world and whose felling drowns it, and he walks the land as one of the Sun’s sons, altering permanently whatever he touches.
Relation to Humans: Mortals owe him the crops, the fish in the rivers and, in some tellings, their own second creation, though he will maim a man over a stolen handful of annatto as readily as he will feed him. Nineteenth-century travellers and missionaries took his name for the local word for God, and among Akawaio and Makushi speakers it is still used that way.

A man stole a piece of annatto from Makonaima. Makonaima tracked him, caught him, cut off his head and his arms and his legs, and turned every piece into stone. In the highlands where that story belongs, the rocks are widely understood to be the leftovers of arguments like this one, and nobody in the telling suggests the punishment was out of proportion.

He is the great figure of the Cariban peoples of the Guiana highlands, the broken tableland where Guyana, Venezuela and Brazil run together under the tepuis. The Akawaio know him, and the Makushi, the Patamona, the Pemón of the Arekuná and Taurepang villages, the Ingarikó. Richard Schomburgk, travelling in the 1840s, was told that his house was Mount Zabang, which he called the Olympus of the Makushi. Nearly every version agrees on one biographical fact and disagrees on almost everything else: he is a child of the Sun.

The Akawaio account that the missionary William Henry Brett put into English verse in 1880 begins before any of that, in a world where the animals were made first, given laws, and given one speech between them so they would live in unity. Over them was set a man, called in the telling Makonaima’s son, and the arrangement worked. In the cool of the day the beasts and birds came back out of the forest to hear him call, and each brought him something to eat. Then Makonaima made them a tree, capped with clouds like high Roraima, hung with every fruit there was.

The tree came down, and inside the stump there was water, and in the water there were fish. The first man saw what he had on his hands, spread the fish among the rivers so that every river should have its share, and then made a wide basket and turned it upside down over the hollow stump to keep the rest of the water where it was. Iwarreka, the brown monkey, had been sent off to fetch water in a basket as a punishment for tormenting the others, and had given up the work. He lifted the lid to see what was hidden underneath, and the flood took him. It took the rest of the world too. The animals got up a hill into the rocks and the cocorite palms while the rain came down for what felt like three or four nights run into one, and while they sat there the howler monkey screamed until his throat swelled to twice its size, the trumpeter bird disobeyed and jumped down into a nest of ants that stripped its legs to sticks, and the alligator, who had come to pay his respects, was accused of stealing the fire and had his tongue pulled out for it. He has made war on everything since.

Walter Roth, who was Protector of Indians in the Pomeroon district and who collected the fullest set of these stories, published in 1915 three versions of the other cycle, from Warrau, Carib and Makushi tellers. In all three Makonaima is a twin, and his brother is Pia. Their mother was carved out of a plum tree by an old man who wanted a son-in-law, married to the Sun, and lost on the road west after her unborn children took offence and stopped giving her directions. She died in the house of a frog who could vomit fire out of her mouth, cook with it, and lick it back up again before anyone came home. The brothers were cut out of her body, grew to man’s size in a month, worked out where the fire was coming from, tied the old frog to a tree in the middle of a cleared field and burned her; the fire that had been inside her went into the surrounding wood, and that is why rubbing two sticks together gets you a flame.

The Carib ending is the one worth knowing. Chasing a tapir who had beaten them both, Pia told Makunaima to circle round in front and turn her back, and as she passed he put a harpoon arrow into her. The rope was in the wrong place. It took Makunaima’s leg off at a stroke. On a clear night the tapir is the Hyades, Makunaima is the Pleiades, and the severed leg is lying just below him in the belt of Orion.

The Makushi version, recorded by Charles Daniel Dance in 1881, gives him an appetite that nothing corrects. He ate live coals. When the old toad objected he lost his temper, dug the first canal, built the first canoe and took his mother and his brother away in it, and on the way the brothers dropped great rocks into all the rivers to hold the fish back. Those rocks are the great waterfalls. Then he fell out with Pia over a crane who had been stealing their catch, sided with the bird against his own brother, and was carried off through the air to Spanish Guiana.

Theodor Koch-Grünberg took the Pemón cycle down at Roraima in 1911 and 1912 from two men, Akúli the Arekuná and Mayuluaípu the Taurepang, and published it in the second volume of Vom Roroima zum Orinoco. He is blunt about what he found: Makunaima, like all tribal heroes, is the great transformer. He turns people and animals to stone. He made the game animals and the fish. After the universal fire destroys mankind he makes new men. He can change shape at will and once became a fish himself to steal a fisherman’s hook. Koch-Grünberg reached for the German word verschlagener, sly or crooked, and noted in a footnote that Mayuluaípu’s own word for him was closer to scoundrel. Lúcia Sá, writing much later, settled on trickster, on the grounds that his creativity and his flat refusal to be sorted into good or bad leave nowhere else to put him.

He is not a kind god.

The question of whether he is a god at all is the oldest argument about him, and it is not the Indians who started it. William Hilhouse in 1832 reported that the tribes acknowledged a superior divinity and universal creator, Richard Schomburgk repeated it in 1848, and Everard im Thurn in 1883 called Makonaima the Supreme Being of the Akawaio and the Maker of Heaven and Earth of the Makushi. Roth went back over the same ground and contradicted all of them. On the evidence, he wrote in 1915, the native tribes of Guiana had no idea of a Supreme Being in the modern sense, and the words they now have for one were framed to suit civilised, especially missionary, requirements; what happened instead was that travellers and clergy took the traditions of tribal heroes for the knowledge of God, unconsciously and in good faith. Both things are now true at once. The scholarly record has him as a transformer and a scoundrel, and Akawaio and Makushi speakers use his name for God. A Brazilian modernist novel of 1928, Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma, took the character straight out of Koch-Grünberg’s pages, kept two of the brothers, and made him world-famous under a spelling nobody in the highlands uses.

What he can do follows from what he is. He makes and unmakes species. He fixes people permanently into rock, which is a punishment and a piece of landscape at the same time. He rearranges rivers. He wears other bodies. Where a whole generation of humanity has been burned out of the world, he starts again, which is the closest thing in the cycle to an act of mercy and is not framed as one.

What he cannot do is get through his own stories unscathed. He loses a leg to his brother’s bad aim. He is caught in the snare of the giant Piaimã, in stories the Pemón told Koch-Grünberg under exactly that title. He can be picked up and flown away by a bird. Among the Makushi there is a being who works against him, named Epel, of whom almost nothing else survives. And the cycle runs, at its far end, to a story of his death and his coming back, which is the last thing you would expect of a supreme being and exactly what you would expect of a hero who has never once behaved like one.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Makonaima?

Makonaima is the great transformer of the Cariban peoples of the Guiana highlands, known to the Akawaio, Makushi, Patamona, Pemón and Ingarikó across Guyana, Venezuela and Brazil. Most versions make him a child of the Sun and the twin of Pia. He made the game animals and the fish, remade humanity after a universal fire, and turned people who crossed him into stone.

Is Makonaima a god or a culture hero?

Both answers have been given, and the dispute is well documented. William Hilhouse in 1832, Richard Schomburgk in 1848 and Everard im Thurn in 1883 all described him as a supreme being or creator god, while Walter Roth argued in 1915 that the Guiana tribes had no such concept and that the words for it were made to fit missionary needs. Theodor Koch-Grünberg recorded him as a tribal hero and transformer, and Akawaio and Makushi speakers today use his name for God.

What does the name Makonaima mean?

William Hilhouse recorded in 1832 that the name signifies “one that works in the dark”, and later writers have repeated the gloss as “he works by night”. It rests on that single early report rather than on a settled linguistic analysis. The name appears as Makonaima, Makunaima, Makunaimö and, in Brazilian Portuguese, Macunaíma.

What is the story of the world tree and the flood?

In the Akawaio version published by William Henry Brett in 1880, Makonaima made a tree capped with clouds like Mount Roraima that bore every kind of fruit. When it was cut down, water and fish were found inside the stump, and the first man covered the hollow with an inverted basket to hold the water back. The brown monkey Iwarreka lifted the basket to see what was hidden there, and the flood that followed drowned the world.

Where does Makonaima appear in the night sky?

In the Carib version collected by Walter Roth, Makunaima and his brother Pia hunted a tapir, and a harpoon rope cut off Makunaima’s leg. The tapir became the Hyades, Makunaima became the Pleiades, and his severed leg became the belt of Orion.