Artifacts of the South American Barrancoid culture, possible representatives of the ancient Arawakans.
In the second volume of his Mythologiques series, Claude Lévi-Strauss proposed a comparison between the ancient Chinese legend of Emperor Yu, who is maimed and limps due to his efforts in controlling the flood, and data from across Americas related to a practice known as “the limping dance,” connected with rites of periodicity and seasonal change. It is worth taking up this comparison again, especially given the role the limping dance seems to have had in ancient shamanic practices that may have been integrated into the Daoist traditions of Ge Hong, the Shangqing, the Lingbao, and others (Granet 1925). A recent study by Alexander Korotayev et. al (Korotayev et al. 2017) provides a historical motivation for the project. Based on statistical correlations between the distribution of certain mythic motifs and gene-types, Korotayev et al. argue that the earliest waves of migration into the Americas may have originated from a proto-culture based on the coasts of South China and Southeast Asia, at least 40,000 years BP, explaining the many shared cultural traits of the Amazonian and Melanesian regions (‘Melazonia’) as an archaic inheritance (as well as in Australia, given the appearance there also of the unmistakable “cult of the bullroarer”). The existence of a South Chinese or Southeast Asian proto-culture suggests that there may be other “inheritances” inhabiting the Chinese tradition that survive in the shamanism-influenced practices of ancient Daoism, such as the Steps of Yu.
N.J Girardot has argued persuasively for a Southeastern origin to a set of mythic themes and images pervasive through early Daoism surrounding the concept of hundun or chaos and linked to the sound of thunder. Hundun is a mythic ontology of cosmogonic reversal, a “return to the One” by means of the mediating third, the closed state of Emperor Hundun in the Zhuangzi whose body diagrams the cosmic gourd or mountain/axis mundi (Girardot 1983). Features of Amazonian shamanic practice and ritual, I will show, also demonstrate an ontology of cosmogonic reversal and the synthesis of opposites, and develop comparable images of container, gourd, mountain, tree, and snake as diagrams of the human body. Most importantly, it develops the potent ambiguity of thunder, as the synthesis of light and dark, dry and wet, fire and water, (what the Daoists would call yin and yang)[1] and whose voice manifests in the bullroarer or trumpet used at masculine initiation rites, a rumbling noise that replicates the sound of hundun and achieves a form of fusion similar to Yu’s Step. I focus on the Northwest Amazonian region, only briefly treated by Lévi-Strauss in his Mythologiques, thus allowing me to present new analyses.
It is necessary to begin the comparison attempted here by first explaining how Lévi-Strauss was led to link elements of Amazonian mythic thought to the Chinese myth of Yu. One figure that replicates Yu is the Bororo character of Bokodori, a limping personage who is responsible for resuscitating many of the Bororo ancestors with his singing and drum-playing, after they just have been thrown into a whirlpool by the sun-god Meri. However, he only resuscitates some of the ancestors, an operation which gives rise to many of the physical differences between distinct Bororo clans or social groups as they emerge from the waters. In a separate myth, it is Bokodori who kills many returning villagers when they do not present him with an adequate amount of ornaments as gifts: those that are left are at the source of the contemporary set of ornaments or emblems as ritual property that define the distinct Bororo clans. Bokodori, in both myths, effects a “reduction” - linked to death - that allows the transition from an excessive quantity of elements in which categorical distinctions would otherwise blur together, i.e the continuous, to a diminished quantity in which the “cultural order” of distinctions can be conceptualized, the discrete (Lévi-Strauss 1964: 35-63).
Bokodori is thus a “hinge” figure and a means of transition in the passage from “nature” to “culture,” from the mythic past of chaos to the present of civilizational order, as Girardot argues is the case for the ancient Chinese figures of Yu, Huangdi, Nuwa, and Yi[2] (Girardot 1983: 157-161). He is, like Yu, a limping figure and drum-player (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 462-463), survivor of the flood/drought, and a controller of waters. Lévi-Strauss will argue that Bokodori is a structural transformation of Gueriguiguiatugo, the Bororo hero of the “key myth” of the Mythologiques series, who is at the origin of thunderstorms, and through the course of the myth acquires the Gourd-Rattle from the land of the dead (Lévi-Strauss 1964: 35-37), the shamanic accoutrement that throughout Amazonia is used to control, abate, or produce thunder.
Throughout Amazonia, the shaman shakes the Gourd-Rattle while entering an ecstatic trance in which he ascends to the heavens and controls the forces of cosmic periodicity. He officiates at rituals that maintain the cycles of seasonal change and transition, avoiding the inertia of an endless day, summer, or drought, “the burnt world,” or otherwise an endless night, “the long night of the rotten” (Lévi-Strauss 1964: 319-415). The shaman is a figure of ambiguity and mediation for he both has mastery over the demons so as to protect his fellow humans but also may transform into the jaguar, whose roar is like the sound of thunder. It is interesting to refer to Johannes Wilbert’s discussion of the symbolism of the Gourd-Rattle amongst the Warao, a tribe of the Orinoco Delta, as a “core symbol” of shamanic thinking. Wilbert argues that the gourd-rattle synthesizes the differentiated forms of round body and elongated handle, womb and phallus, female and male, and expresses a unity of opposites (Wilbert 1993).[3]
In Ge Hong’s Baopuzi, the “Far Roaming” poem, Shangqing texts, and Daoist poetry such as “Pacing the Void,” Yu’s step is connected to a tracing out of cosmic periodicity in the shape of the Big Dipper (Robinet 1997: 143-144), a form which combines a round or rhomboid shape at the center, with a moving elongate pointer that traces out the cardinal directions and the cycles of time, a unity of round and long that recalls the Gourd-Rattle. The Daoist adept ascends to the sky and joins with the Dao by uniting ying and yang elements or modalities of qi, such as inhaling both solar and lunar luminescences, and enters into a state of fusion with the Dao as he copies or traces the movements of the Dipper at the very origin of spatio-temporal differentiation. The Steps of Yu effect a “return to the One” that passes through the mediating third for the Shangqing texts that emphasize the harmonization of the “Three Primordials” in the body, the three “cinnabar fields” or furnaces, as the body emerges as a microcosm of the cosmos (Ibid: 114-183, Robson 2015: 298-305). The three are fused ultimately in the head, the top-and-center, like the synthesis of opposites in the center of the Big Dipper in the heavens, who is associated with Huangdi, the Yellow Emperor of the Center.
The Big Dipper appears to be directly linked to the gourd, in fact. In “Far Roaming,” the rhomboid part of the Dipper is referred to as a ladle (Kroll 1996), which reminds one of the scene in the Zhuangzi where Huizi tries to use a giant gourd as a ladle (Robson 2015: 101).[4] The long form that protrudes from the round or rhomboid shape, in addition, recalls the funnel of the lagenaria gourd and the fact that the gourd is a vine plant.[5] Girardot mentions Southern traditions that compare the head with a top-knot to the lagenaria gourd shape (Girardot 1988: 173-183), which would be relevant here given that the place of the Big Dipper is mapped onto the head of the body (Robinet 1997: 114-148).[6] The fact that the Big Dipper is a manifestation of Huangdi as the Yellow Emperor of the Center reminds one also of Emperor Hundun himself who occupies the center between Hu and Shu of North and South (whose names are linked to thunder and lightning, Girardot argues) and whose “closed” condition prior to Hu and Shu’s piercing of holes replicates the gourd[7] (Girardot 1983: 61-89).
In the episode from the Zhuangzi, Huizi fails to use the gourd as a ladle because it is too large, reminding one of connotations of cosmic “vastness” in the Zhuangzi (such as the Peng bird’s flight across the world (Robson 2015: 98-99) or the Yellow River’s journey to the ocean) related perhaps to journeying through the cosmos. The problem is Huizi is too attached to its “usefulness” and does not know to treat the gourd rather as boat upon which to aimlessly float upon the waters. This last image is linked to the gourd-as-boat (or drum-as-boat) and escape from the flood that Girardot shows to derive from Southern Chinese and Austronesian myths (Girardot 1983: 135-165). The connotation of cosmic voyaging is like shamanic roaming itself which involves joining with the Big Dipper. Joining with the Big Dipper is thus like entering the boat, keeping in mind that the gourd is not only the boat by which one escapes the flood, but itself should be understood as signaling a chaos condition like the flood or thunder itself in which opposites merge (Ibid: 17-34).[8] Finally, the very ambiguity of the boat-as-flood reminds one of the ambiguous powers of Yu or Bokodori and the Amazonian shamans who both control and produce floods, who both master demons and transform into them, using the Gourd-Rattle, whose round-part is often depicted as a head or receives a design like a face. The Gourd-Rattle as a percussion instrument is linked to the drum which Bokodori uses to revive the ancestors. Is this not also how Zhuangzi acted at his wife’s funeral as he absurdly and noisily banged his drum, knowing that death was but part of cosmic periodicity, thus in a sense reversible like the temporality of periodicity itself, and thus that we shouldn’t take it too seriously?
Before exploring how these themes are realized in Northwest Amazonian thought and practice, I return briefly to theme of death and its relation to initiation. At stake is how cosmogonic reversal occurs as an overcoming of death, given that death acts as a mediatory and transitional term in the passage from continuous to discrete, as revealed in the Bororo figure of Bokodori. Within Amazonia, as well as other tribal cultures, initiation is compared to a kind of death in the passage into a “liminal” stage of experience, a sacred state of Being in contact with original, mythic realities. In the Gueriguiguiatugo myth of the origin of thunderstorms and the acquiring of the Gourd-Rattle, the initiatory theme is present in Gueriguiguiatugo’s refusal to leave his mother’s house and to sleep in the men’s house in the center of the village, the place of initiation. He refuses to accept the separation from the mother, an attitude realized in his very act of incest with the mother. It is at that point that his father drives him off the land of the dead in order to retrieve the Gourd-Rattle as he expects him never to return and thus to accomplish revenge against his son.
The theme of initiatory death emerges in the “Far Roaming” poem at the moment in which the voyager looks back to his family on earth and is stopped in his travels a brief moment, before mustering the effort to continue his roaming. It also appears in Ge Hong’s hagiographic tales that tell the story of young boys who departed from their families and learned to practice the method of “leaving the corpse,” as they pretend to die to their mothers while later replacing their corpse with a metonymic substitute for their body (Robinet 1997: 78-113), revealing themselves to have been alive all along, and their newfound immortality. These stories emphasize the ultimate separation from the ‘maternal fold’ as the boys instead learn to join with the Dao as perhaps a kind of cosmic mother.
If joining with the Dao in many ways seems to have associations with a kind of return to the womb (or the inside of the Dipper gourd), a return to state of infancy, joining with “the mother of heaven and earth” as the Dao De Jing describes the Dao, then, this is paradoxical kind of initiation. The Daoist adept must separate from the maternal fold in order to reenter a cosmic mother of a higher order.[9] The paradoxical initiation speaks to the way that Daoists, while rejecting at some level the civilizational order of Confucian hierarchy and distinction, also aimed to create their own counter-order of concretely realized institutions patterned on the Dao, most in evidence in the Tianshi or Celestial Masters tradition where Laozi has become a ruler imparting precepts and laws to the religious community at Hanzhong (Robson 2015: 247-256). As I argue below, Northwest Amazonian ritual is part of an “eternal return” or creatio continua that diagrams seasonal transition and aims to fuse with cosmic periodicity that attains a condition of immortality in its own institualized, social form. The Northwest Amazonian initiation ritual is a periodically enacted rite that effects the cosmogonic reversal brought about by the Steps of Yu which serve to join the Daoist adept with the Dipper.[10]
Through Northwest Amazonia, the societies of the region practice the so-called Yurupary rite, a masculine initiation ritual and sacred flute cult that is linked to similar rituals known throughout Melanesia and Australia. In Northwest Amazonia, these rites are generally performed during times of seasonal transition from the dry season to the wet season; young boys’ penises are “opened” like the flow of sound passing through the flutes, or the rain that pours from the sky, as a form of “male menstruation.” During liminal transition, the boys “die,” and the flutes - which represent the ancestors themselves - are taken from under the waters where they are hidden during the rest of the year. The rite operates an inversion between the living and the dead, where young boys die to be replaced by ancient ancestors that emerge into the world of the living for the duration of the ritual.
At the nodal point between dry and wet season, the initiates experience the mythic past as the participants “become the ancestors” as they dress in ritual ornamentation and play the sacred flutes that are the ancestors themselves. At the same time, these flutes should be understood as part of the sacred ritual property of a given clan and are like the feather headdress and distinct set of names that define clan-belonging. The names of a clan are recycled every other generation such that children take on names of their grandfathers, a cyclical rebirth. At death, the vital soul goes to inhabit the underwater houses of the rivers that are the places of ancestral emergence. Through the bestowal of the name upon newborn children, the ancestor’s soul is reborn from this pool to enter into the child. The cycling of names determines a periodic inversion of living and dead as a mode of “ancestor reincarnation” that realizes an intergenerational immortality.[11] Though the individual must die, the social essence of the individual is maintained as vital energy is circulated between the realms of living and dead.
Christine Hugh-Jones and Stephen Hugh-Jones have both shown that the problematic of immortality is also at play in the initiation rite (C. Hugh-Jones 1979, S. Hugh-Jones 1979). The feminine capacity for menstruation is a snake-like power to shed the skin and to periodically regenerate which is simulated in the “opening” of flutes and boys. In an important myth, evidenced elsewhere in Amazonia (and throughout Melanesia, one of the key points of convergence between the two regions in terms of mythology), humans lose their immortality after refusing to taste the beeswax gourd(=womb) of Romi Kumu or Woman Shaman, whereas the snakes are not so ill-disposed and thereby acquire the power of regeneration instead of man. In another version, humans lose immortality because they fail to heed the call of Warimi, Romi Kumu’s son, who elsewhere appears as the rainbow, a variant of the rainbow-snake that controls thunder (Tavestin 1925).[12] The theme of the snake’s power to regenerate thus shows how the cyclic inversion of states of life and death is itself a form of immortality, what Zhuangzi understood as he thunderously beat his drum at his own wife’s funeral. In the Yurupary rite, young men are made to menstruate and thus to approximate the snake-like power of periodicity. Finally, the periodic performance of the ritual diagrams the periodicity of dry and wet seasons, an oscillation of openness and closure and a synthesis of opposites. The eternal return of cosmic periodicity is replicated in the eternal return of the ritual which ensures immortality as the very cyclicity of life and death in the continuity of the descent group in its names, ancestral flutes, and other ritual property.
The Tukanoan tribes of the Northwest Amazon believe that their ancestors ascended upriver in so many anaconda snake-canoes that were at the origin of the differentiated clans. These anacondas created the rivers - or were the rivers - and the linear organization of the clans (both geographically and in terms of hierarchical ranking) replicates the segmentation of the anaconda’s bones as the ancestors first emerged on to land, adorned in feather ornaments, or appearing as colorful birds. The emergence of the ancestors as birds reminds one of the myth, present elsewhere in Amazonia, of the birds who tear apart the body of the rainbow-snake and from its pieces acquire their distinctive plumage. In some versions, the different kinds of feathers are referred to as “flutes,” which reminds one of the segmented bones of the anaconda as the sacred flutes. The anacondas are thought to have emerged upriver during the wet season, as today do swarms of fish during the spawning period, exactly when the Yurupary rites are held. The passage from fish to birds is homologous to a change of wet to dry, and from soft, fluid, aquatic, underworld qualities, and a fusion inside the maternal and womb-like(=gourd-like) container of the snake-canoe[13] to the segmented, hard, dry, solar, bones of birds and durable ornaments of the patrilineal descent group, undeniably a synthesis of “yin” and “yang” qualities at the point of transition.
The division of the anaconda’s body effects the passage from continuous to discrete that Lévi-Strauss linked to the figure of Bokodori - a version of emperor Yu - as well as to the rainbow-snake. Lévi-Strauss argues that the rainbow represents continuity, since the “short intervals” of the rainbow’s series of colors suggest the possibility of indifferentiation, fusion, and chaos. Girardot develops a similar theme in his discussion of the cosmic giant Pangu that is torn apart to create the universe. Pangu, Girardot argues, is a version of the Southeast Asian tradition of Panhu, the dog-man, or animal ancestor (sometimes a tiger-girl), who is associated with caves and thunder. The dog-man or animal ancestor in addition replaces a gourd-child in certain myths where the child is cut up in order to create the first people (Girardot 1983: 166-201). In turn, the cutting up of the gourd-child, Girardot argues, recalls Emperor Hundun’s being pierced with holes as the transition from the chaos time to the time of cultural degradation and distinction.
The theme of corporeal division, segmentation, piercing, or cutting as a passage from the mythic past of fusion to the contemporary realm of distinction appears in multiple ways in Northwest Amazonia, not solely in the image of the anaconda snake-canoe (or “dragon-boat”). The Desana believe that the origin of yajé (ayahausca) derives from the child, Yajé boy, who was cut into pieces by the first ancestors, accounting for the distinct types of Yajé that correspond to different social groups. Yajé boy replicates his mother, the Daughter of the Sun, who in this myth is called Yajé Woman or elsewhere Vine Woman. She is a version of the gourd-like Woman Shaman of the Barasana, who both appear as “vegetal” people. The vine as an elongate form is specifically compared to the child’s umbilical cord, which must be “cut” by the first ancestors (recalling the separation from the mother theme), which, in fact, connects the child to the mother and her womb, thus implying that the child’s preseparated state - in which he is fused with the mother - is also a synthesis of round and long forms like the Dipper or Gourd-Rattle, as I explored above. The way in which Yajé boy replicates his mother, Yajé Woman or the Daughter of the Sun, is like the way Warimi replicates Woman Shaman amongst the Barasana in alternate myths, and points to the fusion of mother and child not only in the content but in the form of myth.
Warimi appears as the rainbow and is thus latently the rainbow-snake, while the ayahuasca vine is also compared the anaconda. In the Cubeo version of the Yajé boy myth, the infant explicitly appears as an anaconda, and the Cubeo say that the anaconda is like an infant, and that the ancestors were in a kind of state of infancy when they were inside the anaconda-canoe(=womb). Returning to the vegetal theme, it is necessary to recall certain versions in which the mother of Yajé boy, Warimi, or Yurupary is without a hole for a vagina and must first be pierced before she can give birth to the child. In other versions, she is herself a “wooden bride” constructed from a tree (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 223-226). This theme recalls the “anusless beings” who are present in South American folktales as well as Southeast Asian ones and linked to Emperor Hundun. When Yurupary is thrown on the fire and burned to death by his father, he is reborn as a paxiuba palm tree (a hollow tree that bulges in the middle, like a full anaconda) that connects the sky and earth as an axis mundi[14] (the act is itself a synthesis of fire and water, since Yurupary tells his father, the sun,[15] that “only fire can kill him,” for he is a water-being in his association with rivers, menstrual flows, and the rains). It is from this tree that flutes are cut and constructed, and must be cut in order to usher in the phase of civilization, like the cutting of the umbilical cord of Yajé boy or the piercing of the “wooden bride,” or Emperor Hundun. Amongst the Tukanoans, Yurupary generally appears as an anaconda, like the snake-canoes, but also has tapir, jaguar, or monkey features (the monkey features are particularly in evidence amongst the Arawak), showing that he is also a hybrid and protean “animal-ancestor” (Girardot 1983: 183-98), coming full circle back to the Southeast Asian Panhu theme analyzed by Girardot.
Throughout Amazonia, Melanesia, and Australia the bull-roarer used in initiation cults is compared to a fish or snake (Baal 1963). The sound of the bull-roarer is the rumbling, droning, or buzzing voice of thunder, like the sound of Hundun or Yu, Zhuangzi, or Bokodori’s banging of a drum. In Northwest Amazonia, the bull-roarer is not used, but the enormous trumpet that the Arawak call the “jaguar-bone flute” takes its place as the roar that imitates thunder. Reichel-Dolmatoff interprets this sound as the threatening sound of the punishment against incest (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1974), an interpretation which resonates with analyses of bullroarer cults in Melanesia and Australia (Herdt 1984). This confirms again the role of the bullroarer cult in the transition from out of the maternal fold or incestuous condition into the civilizational order. At the same time, thunder is its own “fusional” synthesis of opposites such that initiation ritual, in appropriating the power of the flutes, in fact retains the state of the chaos-condition even as the initiates separate from the maternal fold.
I would argue that the ambiguity of thunder is linked to the way thunder combines the dark rain-cloud that blots out the sky with lightning as brightness and fire. The notion of thunder as synthesis of light and dark, fire and water, “yin” and “yang” elements, can be confirmed through an analysis of Northwest Amazonian mythology that demonstrates an internal duality to thunder as homologous with the distinction between sun and moon (and consequently day/night, dry/wet season). In the Barasana myth of Warimi, Warimi’s mother is fertilized by the thunders. Warimi’s mother, a version of Woman Shaman, is the Pleaides, an internally dual constellation since it not only heralds the dry season through its appearance, but the wet season through its disappearance (Lévi-Strauss 1966). Woman Shaman’s equivalent amongst the Desana is the Daughter of the Sun, whom Reichel-Dolmatoff suggests is Venus, who demonstrates a similar duality as she appears either as the morning star (associated with the sun), or the evening star (associated with the moon) (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1978). The same duality undergirds her status as the wife of the sun, whom his brother, the moon, nonetheless tries to steal. At the same time, the sun and the moon are understood to be two manifestations of the same person (a common idea in Amazonia, (Lévi-Strauss 1967)), such that the incident is also understood as the incest of the sun with his own daughter, of which the roar of the trumpet during the Yurupary rite is a reminder and threat of punishment should the crime of incest be repeated.
The Daughter of the Sun, as Venus, is thus an internally dual woman between two men, who are themselves really one figure. The theme of the woman between two men appears in a different Barasana myth in which Manioc-stick Anaconda (a version of the moon) attempts to steal the wife of Old Macaw (a version of the sun) (which incidentally confirms that the opposition fish/birds, water/sky, below/above is homologous to sun/moon, day/night). In the Cubeo myth of Yajé boy, instead of two men and one woman, there are two women and one man, and it is now the man who is Venus. One of the women is “beautiful” and the other “ordinary,” an opposition which elsewhere is used to code the difference in light or darkness between the sun and the moon (Lévi-Strauss 1968, Goldman 2004). In the Desana Yajé boy myth, as well as the Arawak myths of Kuwai, it is the sun who is the father, instead of thunder. Whether the father, mother, or the child represents thunder, Venus, Pleaides, or Sun/Moon it is clear that in each case we are dealing with internally or externally dual figures, and thunder must be included in this set as homologous with the oppositions of light/dark, fire/water, dry/wet that structures the series.
There is more direct evidence for concept of thunder as a synthesis of “yin” and “yang” qualities. The Arawakan Baniwa understand that in the beginning of time a chaotic battle took place between Iaperikuli, the primal sun, and the eenunai, the thunders, who appear as monkeys and other tree-dwelling beings. The chief of the eenunai, Dzauiwkapa, in particular, is the night monkey who is a paradigmatic omen of death and darkness. The Baniwa figure of Yurupary, called Kuwai, in many ways replicates Dzauiwkapa at a later cosmogonic stage, and himself appears as the sloth but also has a “jaguar’s mouth”[16] (Wright 1998). Dmitri Karadimas, basing himself on an analysis of a number of Andean funerary cloths as well as Mirana myths - a Witotan group of the southern region of the Northwest Amazon - argues that the night-monkey has jaguar-esque features related to its eyes which shine through the darkness. In addition, he argues for a relation between the night-monkey and the outer four stars of Orion (Karadimas 2016). In a Tecuna myth, an enormous tree which connects sky and earth blotted out the sky, until it was pierced with holes, revealing stars which shine through it like eyes (Nimuendaju 1952). A Desana myth tells of how humans acquired shiny copper earings from a dark-haired jaguar-esque figure and Thunder being who has hence been rendered harmless since his loss of the copper earings. However, the fire can still be seen within his eyes (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1975). The last part of this myth reminds one of a Kayapo myth analyzed by Lévi-Strauss, in which the jaguar loses cooking fire to man, but the fire can still be seen in his eyes. This cooking fire is itself a terrestrial and human version of the fire of the sun, with which humans cooked their food before the acquisition of cooking fire and when the sky and earth were closer together (i.e the condition of the “long day” or “burnt world”) (Lévi-Strauss 1964). All these connections suggest that lightning, the light that accompanies dark thunderstorms, can be assimilated to either the fire of the sun, or of stars, which shine through the night, or through the canopy which blots out the sky like a thundercloud.
The image of a great tree that blots out the sky reminds one of the enormous gnarled tree that makes its appearance in the Zhuangzi, an image not discussed by Girardot. The giant tree spreads in all four directions and seems to cover the sky. It as “vast” as the journey of the Peng bird, who was first a fish below but roamed as a bird above, or the passage of the Yellow River God to the Western sea (Robson 2015). Unlike Huizi who did not know to use a gourd as a boat, the gnarled tree knows how to be “useless,” and it is in this way that he avoids being ‘cut up’ and thus retains the closed condition of Emperor Hundun, the synthetic unity of thunder (Hu) and lightning (Shu) (Girardot 1998). The Shangqing visionaries could also acquire this condition by supping lunar and solar beams, binding yin and yang elements, and combining the three-fold cinnabar fields and the Three Luminescent Ones. Visualizations which unfold a glimmering multiplicity of colors and lights, they remind one of the rainbow and its “short series” of distinctions that paradoxically intensifies multiplicity in its movement to indifferentation and continuity, a primal experience of the One. Not only a multiplicity of visions, but of sounds, and fragrances that themselves seem to fuse, a synesthetic melding of the senses themselves, just like Yajé boy’s cries which were both music and beautiful images expressing the light of the sun (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1985). These same hallucinatory images are for the Cubeo ornaments or “macaw feathers” (Goldman 2004) like the “feathered cape” which the Shangqing visionaries aimed to acquire, perhaps grounded in the shamanic traditions of Southeast Asia. To have ancestral jade bones and to wear the feather cape, to be a dragon of the waters and an ascending solar bird, to be the Peng bird, the dragon-boat, soaring through the skies, the god of the Yellow River? We have begun to move in circles, or spirals, like Bokodori’s whirlpool…
In this article, I have tried to show the connection between the Daoist mythic ontology of cosmogonic reversal and practices of Amazonian shamanism and ritual. I connected the Steps of Yu and the Big Dipper to the shamanic Gourd-Rattle, and also showed how the cult of the Yurupary flutes replicated the sound and imagery of thunder in the Hundun complex of mythic imagery, analyzed by Girardot. I have tried to “compare comparisons” and to locate the homologies that exist between Amazonian and Daoist analogical systems of thought (Stengers 2005). At the same time, I have tried to give historical, and not merely structural, motivations for these connections by taking off from the statistical work of Korayatev et. al. The cult of the bullroarer is most likely an inheritance that goes back to a Southern Chinese or a Southeastern proto-culture or proto-ontology at least 40,000 years BP (Korayetev et al. 2005). Whereas the cult of the bullroarer is preserved in Melanesia, Australia, and Amazonia but not on the Asian mainland, there is every reason to believe that the ontology of thunder that links gourds, floods, snakes, boats, mountains, and the synthesis of “yin” and “yang,” is an inheritance common to Amazonia and Ancient Chinese Daoism.
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Footnotes:
[1] Indeed, the Amazonian “logic of sensory qualities” (Lévi-Strauss 1964) often seems to line up quite precisely with many of the associations of yin and yang, dry, hard, fiery, bright, light, male often being opposed to wet, soft, watery, dark, heavy, female. For more on this theme, see Roe 1982.
[2] Girardot only briefly mentions the myth of the archer Yi who shoots the nine of the original ten suns (Girardot 1983: 87) with his arrows in order to end the drought. The myth reminds one of both a Machiguenga myth (a tribe of the Peruvian Amazon) in which in the beginning of time an endless day persisted because of a multiplicity of suns that replaced each other at the end of each day, a situation that had to be ended for a balanced periodicity to take hold, and also of the widespread myth of the decapitated head of the sun or moon rising up into the sky which in a Mundurucu version is shot in the eye with an arrow as it rises. The myth also strikes me as linked to the incest of sun and moon myth which is distributed throughout the Americas (Lévi-Strauss 1964) as well as Melanesia and Australia. In the Eskimo version of the incest of the sun and moon myth, the sun cuts off her breast and gives it to the moon in response to the moon’s advances. A Melanesian ritual amongst the Yafar of the West Sepik region of New Guinea, analyzed by Bernard Juillerat, culminates with the initiate shooting an arrow in the direction of the sun, which stands for the mother’s breast (Juillerat 1992). All these connections suggest to me that the Yi myth is rooted in a mythic structure that belongs to the “proto-culture” at the source of Australian, Melanesian, and Amazonian mythic systems and that has resonances in Daoist thought and practice.
[3] Amongst the Arawaté, a Tupian tribe of the Xingu, the gourd-rattle, unlike other objects, is always constructed both by men and women who jointly contribute to the product (Viveiros De Castro 1992).
[4] The role of this incident in the story, in fact, suggests that this was a common usage of gourds (also Girardot 1988: 180).
[5] It is worth noting that the opposition round/long also plays a role in South American astronomies, where the Pleaides, a round form, is opposed to Orion’s belt, a long form, that is sometimes the culture hero’s chopped off leg (recall Yu or Bokodori’s limping condition) (Lévi-Strauss 1964:199-240). In many parts of Amazonia, the year is divided into two halves (wet season and dry season) signaled by the Pleaides, on the one hand, and Scorpio, on the other, the latter a long and sinuous shape (Stephen Hugh-Jones 2015).
[6] The Tukanoan shamans of the Northwest Amazon often alternate between thinking of the universe as a gourd, a womb, or a head/brain within which transformative processes occur (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1978).
[7] The theme of “closing” and “opening” the body is absolutely fundamental to the entire Amazonian mythic system (Levi-Strauss 1964: 147-164, Stephen Hugh-Jones 2019) and is linked also to the theme of “anusless beings” present also in Southeast Asian and Austronesian mythology.
[8] In the Carribean area, as well as parts Central America, the Big Dipper is the night-time manifestation of the spirit of hurricanes and thunderstorms, and appears as a rainbow during the day (Lehmann-Nietzsche 1924). Below, I show how the rainbow-snake, who is a master of thunderstorms throughout Amazonia (as well as Australia), is also linked to a canoe or boat, and also to the gourd. The rainbow-snake is also a manifestation of Scorpio (Tavestin 1925), an elongate form, but its gourd-like features simultaneously endow it with roundness (for example, the anaconda who appears with a bulging belly as if pregnant after it has swallowed its prey). So the relation between the Big Dipper and the Amazonian Gourd-Rattle as connected to periodicity and thunder also has a direct equivalent in the Americas.
[9] The analysis is complicated by the greater importance that seems to be given to the head in the Shangqing traditions as indicative of the place of heaven, though the head also appears as another “cinnabar field” like the belly (recall the Dao De Jing’s “belly knowledge”), as if we have simply a transposition or a unification of the two notions.
[10]In the Lingbao tradition, the Steps of Yu would play a key role in rituals that aimed at resuscitating the ancestral dead and attaining immortality for the living (Robinet 1997: 149-183).
[11] It is stunning the degree to which an identical notion exists in Australia. For the Yolngu of Northeast Arnhem Land, the souls of the ancestors inhabit sacred rock pools as fish and enter into the body of the child at birth. The kinship term of the grandfather replicates the name of the grandson, as in Northwest Amazonia, such that the pools are the sites of an “ancestor reincarnation” and soul-recycling. The Yolngu practice a secondary burial that involves depositing the ornamented bones of the ancestors in these pools, like the flutes(/ornaments) that are the bones of the ancestors and hidden under the waters in Northwest Amazonia. The rainbow-snake presides over these pools and it is his voice that is manifested in the bull-roarer used at initiation rites, the voice of thunder (Warner 1937).
[12] And that also appears as the constellation Scorpio (Ibid.).
[13] The snake-canoe is obviously a “dragon-boat” like the dragon-boat festivals of China and Southeast Asia which is also called the “dumpling festival,” reminding one of Girardot’s dumpling as gourd-boat theme.
[14] The mountains or rocky hills that the Tukanoans understand to bound the edges of the world and hold up the sky can also be referred to as “petrified trees” (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1974, Arhem 2003), showing that the tree as axis mundi is here a free variant of the mountain.
[15] Whereas Yurupary is generally associated with the moon (Wright 1998, S. Hugh-Jones 1979).
[16] Linked, of course, to the roaring of the “jaguar-bone flute.”