Flood Myths of South America

The dry crossing at Serpent’s Mouth

Warao tradition remembers the Columbus Channel and the Serpent’s Mouth as dry country joining Trinidad to the mainland. A hurricane arrives, the ground splits, and the ocean fills the new passages. It is not an island-wide deluge. It is the origin of one specific channel and the permanent loss of one specific route.

Arie Boomert sets the tradition beside the archaeology and the sea-level history and finds them describing the same thing. People walked to Trinidad before it was an island; postglacial water established the island’s broad modern contour between about 7000 and 6000 BC. An independent UNESCO synthesis singles out the same Warao memory of a dry Serpent’s Mouth as a survival of regional history in oral form.

This is the northern end of a short, sharp coastal file. Four of its members are on the map, and they are the ones a reader arrives expecting: a lost land bridge, an opening strait, a new archipelago, an ocean wall against a mountain range. They are also, as it turns out, almost the whole of the continent’s drowned-coast material. Everything else on this map — and there is a great deal of it — is at work on another problem.

When Patagonia became islands

In 1915, Joseph Luis Miguel Kalapacte and other Selk’nam consultants told José María Beauvoir that their ancestors came from far to the north, always walking overland. After a cataclysm the isthmuses could no longer be found, and Karukinká — Isla Grande — stood apart from the continent. Geological reconstruction puts the final flooding of that bridge around 8,000 years ago, with people already in the region when it went.

A second Selk’nam story explains more than the main strait. Táiyin sends immense stones crashing down; the ground splits, water fills the fissures, and the Strait of Magellan, the Beagle Channel, Isla de los Estados and the western islands appear. The Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino preserves the narrative from Martin Gusinde’s corpus. The landforms it names are exact: the strait, the channel and the outer islands all stand where the story says the water went in.

Gusinde recorded a third Fuegian telling in which water covers the whole land and its hills, people flee to the rocks, and some of them do not come back as people: they become sea lions and birds, and shamans afterwards pool their strength to hold off another advance. The island world that story ends in — marine animals, refuge rocks, bird colonies, shamanic authority over the sea — is the island world the Selk’nam lived in. Rafael Karsten took down a fourth, in which weeks of snow and sleet bring inundation, cold and hunger, and there is no summer at all. Four Fuegian tellings, four different causes, one archipelago.

The birth of the Chiloé archipelago

In the Chilote and Huilliche Cai Cai–Ten Ten cycle, the sea serpent raises the water and the earth serpent raises the hills to answer it. High ground surrounded by new sea becomes the archipelago, named hill by hill. The specifically island-making version fits a postglacial comparison better than the broad Trengtreng–Kaikai complex to the north, which Mapuche-led research reads as a durable working model of the recurring earthquake, tsunami backwash, subsidence and uplift of the active Chilean margin.

Those two readings are not rivals. They are the same instrument used at two timescales. On the Tirúa coast the contest between the serpents is a manual for what the ground does every few generations; on Chiloé it is the account of how the islands came to be islands at all. What both hold is the shape of the country afterwards: refuge heights with names, and water where there was none.

The drowned come back as the clans

Now go inland, and the flood changes employer.

Telêmaco Borba published the Kaingang deluge at Curitiba in 1908, from the Tibagi country of Paraná, and it opens the way the coastal stories do — with rising water and one summit left. What happens next is not a rescue. The Kaingang, the Kayurukré and the Kamé all swim for the Serra Krinjijimbé carrying lit brands of firewood in their mouths. The Kaingang and a few Kurutons reach the top, some standing on the rock and some, for want of room, clinging to the branches of the trees. The Kayurukré and the Kamé tire and drown, and their souls go to live inside the mountain.

The survivors wait many days without food, expecting to die, until they hear the singing of the saracuras — wood rails — coming with earth in baskets and throwing it into the water, which withdraws slowly. The people shout at the birds to hurry; the birds quicken their song and call in the ducks to help. The birds work from the side where the sun rises, and that is why the rivers of that country all run west into the great Paraná. The men who had waited it out in the branches came down as monkeys, and the Kurutons who had clung there came down as howlers.

Then the flood does its real work. The Kayurukré and the Kamé, whose souls had gone into the mountain, begin to dig their way out through the inside of it, and after long labour they emerge by two separate paths. Kayurukré’s road was flat and stoneless and a fine stream sprang up along it, which is why his people have small feet. Kamé’s road went through broken rock, and he and his people bruised and swelled their feet on the march, which is why they have big ones; no water rose on their road either, so they had to ask Kayurukré for it, and he gave them leave to drink whenever they needed. Out on the open ground the two of them made the animals of the world by night, out of ash and charcoal, Kayurukré making the tapir and the anteater and the good bees, Kamé making the pumas, the venomous snakes and the wasps to fight them.

And then they married.

“They came to a great field, joined the Kaingang, and agreed to marry the young men and the young women. They married the Kayurukré first to the daughters of the Kamé, and these to the daughters of those, and as there were men left over they married them to the daughters of the Kaingang. That is why Kayurukré, Kamé and Kaingang are kin and friends.” — Telêmaco Borba, Actualidade Indígena (Curitiba, 1908), p. 22

That is the ending of a flood story, and it is a marriage rule. Everything preceding it — the firebrands, the birds with baskets, the two tunnels, the small feet and the big feet — exists to arrive there. The Kaingang did not survive a disaster. They were made by one, in halves, and the halves are why a Kaingang marriage is possible at all.

Eight hundred miles north-west, in Mato Grosso, the Salesian father Antonio Colbacchini printed the Bororo lenda do dilúvio in 1919 with the same architecture and none of the same furniture. A man shoots and wounds the yellow spirit Jacomo. The waters come up over the whole country and one man alone reaches the top of a mountain. He heats stones and drops them into the water until it sinks back — a survivor who does not wait out the flood but boils it off. He fathers children on a doe, and their children are more human than they are, and their children more human again, until the line is human. And then the line splits, into Tugarege and Cerae, the two halves a Bororo village is still built from.

A Bororo village is a circle. Draw one line across it and you have the whole social order: the houses on one side belong to Çera, the houses on the other to Tugare, a man of one half takes a wife from the other, and the men’s house in the middle has a door on each side so that a man leaves it into his own country. Everything the Bororo do — who buries whom, who paints whom, who may sing what — runs along that line. The flood put it there. The deluge is not remembered as a thing that happened to the Bororo; it is the reason there are two kinds of Bororo.

Two unrelated languages, two thousand kilometres apart, and the same move: the flood as the origin of a two-part society, with the drowned themselves coming back as the parts. It does not run in the family. The other Macro-Ge peoples who live in moieties — Xavante, Krahó, Apinajé, Kayapó — do not derive them from a flood. Kaingang and Bororo are the two who do, and they are the clearest thing in the continent’s interior corpus.

The coast got there first. The oldest recorded flood on the continent is the Tupinambá telling André Thevet took down at Cabo Frio in the sixteenth century, and it is already a story about two. The brothers Tamendonare and Ariconte quarrel; Ariconte strikes the ground until water erupts and covers the earth; and two couples survive — in two separate trees. Each couple becomes the ancestor of a renewed people. Four hundred years before an ethnographer reached the Tibagi, the first flood anyone wrote down in South America was ending the way Kaingang and Bororo floods end: with humanity handed back in halves.

The Kayapó flood is on the map for a different bequest. A hunter digging out an armadillo cut through what he took for a thick vine. It was the artery of the Earth, and the water came out of it and did not stop. The people who climbed the last tall trees stayed up there and starved, and they are the wasps and the termites that still nest in the crowns. One old woman shut herself into a large pestle with a boy, a girl and her seed-gourds, and sealed the mouth of it with wax; when she came out she had the seed with her, so the gardens could be started again. The ones who climbed became insects. The one who sealed herself in came back holding agriculture, and she is a grandmother with her gourds.

It is worth sitting with what that instrument is. Among the Bororo the roaring board carries the voice of a monster that lives underwater, and it is sounded over the handling of the dead. The people whose flood story ends with the drowned climbing back out of a mountain to found the clans keep an object whose whole office is to let something that lives at the bottom of the water speak at a funeral.

The water was inside the trees

On the Pilcomayo, where Bolivia, Argentina and Paraguay come together in the dry Chaco, the flood has a different premise altogether. The water is not in the sky and not in the sea. It is locked inside the trees.

The Mataco — Wichí — tell it this way. When the world was not yet properly made, all the water there was and all the fish there were lived inside the bottle trees, and one good man owned them. People gathered to him because of the fish; he was the reason anyone ate. There was a dorado in there, and he told a man to leave it alone. The man shot it. The bottle tree broke and the water came out over everyone. The owner made an otter and sent it away with the flood to live in it, and then he made the earth.

A second Mataco telling from the lagoon country downriver runs the plot again with a different ending. A wanderer and the son he had spoken into being come to a village where the people keep a dorado in a bottle tree. He shoots it, and the sea comes out. The chief holds the water back with his staff, then hands the wanderer a smaller staff and makes him walk the sea out of the country himself; where the man finally turns into a gourd and stops it, a lagoon and a stream are left standing. The released waters of the world, corralled by two men with sticks, ending as a pond you can point at.

Now the part that makes this more than a good story. The same plot — the bottle tree, the named fish, the prohibition, the shooting, the flood — is told by the Toba as well. Mataco is Matacoan. Toba is Guaycuruan. These are unrelated language families sharing one river. A generic deluge crossing that boundary would prove nothing; whole continents share generic deluges. But this plot is not generic. It specifies the container, the species, the instruction and the weapon, and it specifies them the same way on both sides of a family line. That is a borrowing, and a borrowing is a trail — the strongest one this continent has produced.

The stump is the mountain

The Chaco is not the only place where the water starts inside a tree. Six hundred miles north, in the Cariban highlands of the Guianas, three peoples of one language family tell three solutions to the same plot, and the Atlas maps all three.

The Akawaio of the upper Mazaruni put it first. Sigu warns the people before the great world tree is cut. A monkey opens its water-filled stump; the flood comes out; survivors shelter in a palm or a cave and carry seeds and fire through it, and afterwards fire, plants, animals and peoples spread out through the Guianas. The Macushi of the Rupununi keep the flood and drop the tree: one man survives in a canoe, a rat brings him maize, and Makunaima turns stones into new people. Same family, same country, and the story has already begun trading its parts around.

The third telling is the one Theodor Koch-Grünberg took down from the Taulipáng narrator Mayúluaipu, and it is the best of them. Five brothers — Makunaima, Manápe, Anzikilan, Wakalámbe and Anike — lived at the foot of Roroíma, and they were hungry. The agouti Akúli, who was a man in those days, found deep in the forest a huge tree called Wazáka that bore every good fruit there is — every kind of banana, papaya, cashew, orange, maize — and ate from it every day and told nobody. Makunaima caught him out by lifting his lip while he slept and finding a scrap of banana in his mouth.

So they went and felled it. Akúli begged them not to — don’t cut it down, don’t cut it down, or a great deal of water will come! — and stopped up with fruit rind and beeswax every hole the axe made. Manápe cut anyway, softening the wood with a spoken formula until the axe sank in. And the tree came down.

Had it fallen this way, the story says, there would be bananas in the forest here. It fell the other way, to the north, and a great deal of water burst out of the stump, and with the water came the fish — a kind of trahira, very large — and they all went to the far side too. So over there the forest is full of banana groves nobody planted and lacks for nothing, and the rivers hold pirahiba and surubim, the great fish; and on this side the fish are few and small. The bananas belong to the Mauari, the mountain demons, whose houses are Roraima and the other tables, and only the shamans see them.

This is not a memory of water. It is a landform etiology with a flood inside it, and it is doing three jobs at once: it explains a mountain, it explains why the fruit and the big fish are over there and not here, and it explains who owns the north. That is a large amount of work for one story, and it is the reason the story is still told.

Three tellings, one family, one plot, three destinations — a cosmogony in the Mazaruni, a repopulation in the Rupununi, a mountain and a fishery on Roraima. Then look back at the Pilcomayo, two thousand five hundred kilometres south. There, the world’s water and the world’s fish are inside a tree; a man is told to leave the great fish alone; he shoots it; the tree breaks and the water comes out over everyone. On Roraima the world’s water and the world’s great fish are inside a tree; a man is told not to cut it; he cuts it; the water and the fish come out and go north. Same container, same prohibition, same forbidden stroke, same released fish — on opposite ends of the continent, in languages with nothing in common. Whatever carried that from one end to the other, it was not the plot being obvious. A narrow story travelled intact, and each society that received it set it to work on the piece of the world it most needed explained.

What the river taught the story

The interior floods are cosmological in cause and exact in practice. The knowledge in them is river knowledge, and it shows in the details a fisherman would notice.

Curt Nimuendajú recorded the Ticuna deluge on the upper Solimões. A man’s dog began to speak in human words. It told him a great flood was coming, that it was going to Mount Vaipį, and that he should come along. The man would not follow a dog to a place he did not know. So the dog told him instead to have a big canoe ready, and left.

The water burst boiling out of the ground and covered everything. The family rode it out in the canoe, moored to a tree by a liana — and as the water climbed they had to lengthen the liana again and again. That is not myth. That is what you do on the várzea, on a river that rises ten metres a year, and anyone who has moored a boat in flooded forest knows the arithmetic of it. They came aground at last on Vaipį, left the canoe there — it is said to be on the mountain still — and followed the long vine home.

On the upper Rio Negro and the Içana, the Baniwa flood is the widest charter in this group, and it belongs to the creator himself. Iaperikuli walked the country naming the rivers with the animals coming along behind him. Then he darkened the world and raised the river until every animal alive was crowded into one abiu tree. The night monkey Dzauikwapa dropped fruit to test how deep the water was, then hollowed a fruit out and rode it down past the grandfather piranha; thunder came and split the tree open, and a dove brought back razor-grass — the sign there was food again. The rivers still carry the names Iaperikuli gave them, and the animals still hold the places he put them in. This one flood hands out the river names, the animals’ stations, the night monkey’s poison song and the shaman’s way into the world, all at once — and it does so in the country of the yuruparí, the sacred-flute and anaconda-ancestor cults of the northwest Amazon, where the man who named the rivers is also the head of the family the flutes speak for.

The Yaruro of the Capanaparo, in the Venezuelan llanos, take the observation further. People stopped saying that Kuma was the mother of the water and of everything else, so Kuma rained until nothing stood above the water but one tree on the upper Capanaparo and one hilltop. A man and his sister held on in the tree; a man and his aunt on the hill; a giant fish circled below them, and they ate bark and leaves. The water went down an arm’s length a day.

An arm’s length a day is a measured rate, and the Capanaparo floods its entire plain every wet season, leaving exactly the isolated tree-and-hilltop islands the story strands its people on. The tradition has watched this happen. And then it uses it: the two men married the two women, and when a later brother and sister married, an uncle turned their children into a jaguar and a snake — which is why no Yaruro marries a sister, and why the Yaruro, the jaguar and the snake are kin. A whole cosmological flood, observed to the arm’s length, spent on a rule about who you may not marry.

On the Araguaia the Karajá do it in one stroke. The great water came, and it would not stop raining, and there was nowhere left to go. Then Maíjǫri, the first of the animals, came and took the people who had given up and walked them up the tall two-peaked mountain near the mouth of the Tapirapé. The water rose no higher than that summit and the Karajá lived. The mountain has carried Maíjǫri’s name ever since.

Look at the Atlas’s other named refuges — Villca Coto in Huarochirí, Ancasmarca in the Antisuyu, the Sierra de la Ventana on the pampa, Jeepüsü in the Guajira — and the mountain is always named for itself. The Karajá peak is named for the rescuer. The Araguaia gave that story its water; the Karajá decided what it should commemorate, and they chose the one who did the walking.

Jeepüsü earns a second look before it goes back into the list, because its flood is spun. An old spinner’s cotton becomes pursuing ocean spray — the sea manufactured out of a woman’s own craft — and a young man escapes it by boat to Jeepüsü, whose hill grows while the water rises and shrinks again when it falls. A water mark and a stone boat remain on the hill. On a continent where the flood is usually a punishment or an accident, the Wayuu made it a textile.

Chucuito, and a very large lake

At Chucuito on the Peruvian shore of Lake Titicaca, Harry Tschopik recorded an Aymara account of the beginning of things in four lines. The earth lay under water. Snake and Frog fought each other for the mastery of it. The sun came between them, dried the water off, and gave the earth back to people.

The temptation here is obvious. Titicaca’s palaeolake highstands were real, and they were enormous — the basin has held water tens of metres above the modern lake. A flood tradition recorded on its shore looks like the obvious place to find that water remembered. It is not. Nothing in the text reaches for the lake: no water is named, no shoreline, no refuge, no ascent, no survivors. What the story has instead is a snake and a frog wrestling for the world, which is a cosmogony of a wholly different family, at home from the Andes to the Amazon.

The Kogi of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta ask the same discipline for the opposite reason. Konrad Preuss took down a deluge in which the chief Žántana, seeing people lying with animals and with their own kin, opens the doors of the sky; Mama Seižankua builds a boat and puts into it the four-footed animals, the birds and every kind of plant; the elder brother Mulkueikai goes in and shuts the door. That is the Genesis sequence — the loaded ark, the shut door, the mountain landing — recorded from a people under long missionary pressure. What is Kogi in it is the rest: the boat comes to rest on the ridge of the Sierra Negra, and the rain that fell for four years was red and green, and left standing lagoons that took nine ages to dry, exactly as the Mámas had said. Four years of red and green rain is nobody’s Genesis.

And the north coast keeps the counter-case: a flood that ends an order instead of founding one. The Lambayeque dynasty descended from Naylamp held power beside a green-stone idol he had installed; the ruler Fempellec decided to move it. Unprecedented rain fell for thirty days, and a year of hunger and sterility followed. The priests and nobles blamed the ruler, bound him and threw him into the sea, and his line’s authority ended in the water with him. Everywhere else on this continent the flood hands an order over. At Lambayeque the cult object is the order, the rain is the penalty for touching it, and the sea is where the dynasty is disposed of.

The tide that answered a coup

The southernmost flood in the world is about who owns a ceremony.

In Yaghan tradition the Kina — the masked lodge of the Beagle Channel people — belonged first to the women. They held it exactly as the men held it in Gusinde’s day: a closed house, painted spirits, and the other sex kept out by the terror of what came out of it. Hánuxa, the moon-woman, presided. Then the men discovered what the spirits were, took the house, and kept it.

Hánuxa answered with water. She sent a great tide against the men who had seized her ceremony; the people fled to the five highest peaks of the archipelago; and when the water fell they came down — with the men still holding Kina. The flood does not undo the coup. It closes the question. The world after the water is the one in which the lodge belongs to the men, and the moon keeps the grievance without the power to reverse it.

That is the charter move this essay has been following all along, made with unusual candour — the Kaingang drowned come back as the moieties, the Batki come out of the water holding rain, and the Yaghan men come down off the peaks holding Kina, the flood hired as the notary of the new order. And it is told at the far end of the earth from the other place the Atlas knows this exact story. In Arnhem Land the Djanggawul sisters own the sacred things until the men take them, and the flood-bringing python attends the ceremony the men now hold. Whether one story travelled or one settlement was twice notarised the same way, the two ends of the inhabited world tell the seizure of the women’s ceremony with a flood standing beside it.

The Yaghan keep a second flood, and it turns on an offended bird: Lexuwakipa, the ibis-woman, brings months of snow and ice, and when it melts the water goes over the mountains. Two causes, one archipelago, and in both the world that comes back down off the peaks is the one the tellers were living in when Gusinde and Wilbert wrote it down.

The world after the water

Set the fifty-seven traditions side by side and the continent divides cleanly, not by how good the stories are but by what they are for.

On the coast, the flood remembers. Warao tradition holds a dry Serpent’s Mouth that the ocean took; Selk’nam tradition holds walking routes that stopped being walkable; the Chilote cycle holds the making of an archipelago out of refuge hills. These are the only places where the water in the story and the water in the shelf record are describing the same event, and they sit where you would expect them to sit — on the drowned edges, Trinidad, the Fuegian straits, the Chilean channels, the Atlantic Brazilian shore where Guyraypotý’s plank house floats up as the sea comes over the Serra do Mar.

Inland, the flood constitutes. It is not a lesser use of the story; it is the more common one, and on this continent it is the more elaborate one. The Kaingang flood makes two marriage classes and equips them with feet, water rights and animals. The Bororo flood makes Çera and Tugare and hands them a village plan. The Yaruro flood ends in the prohibition on marrying a sister and a kinship with the jaguar and the snake. The Urarina flood establishes weaving, childbirth and the law of the lying-in. The Huñi Kuin survivor makes children out of gourds and teaches crops, cooking and house-building. Viracocha, after the Unu Pachakuti, does not merely remake people — he issues them their dress, their languages, their songs, their crops and the country each is to live in. The Cañari flood ends with two macaws becoming women, and their six children are the Cañari. The Piaroa flood ends with a pendare tree nursing the children who become the Piaroa and their neighbours.

That is the pattern, stated plainly: the flood is the mechanism by which a society explains that it is the shape it is. The East Asia essay can put a number on it — of 232 minority flood texts from the Chinese southwest, 79 per cent end by instituting the present order, the surnames, the peoples, the marriage of the surviving brother and sister. Nobody has counted South America that way. What this map offers instead is the cleanest demonstration of the two uses standing side by side on one map, close enough to compare: a Selk’nam story about a road that went under, and eight hundred miles of Ge and Chaco and Guiana country where the story is about how the village is laid out.

The two uses are one instrument. Whether the water takes away a walking route or takes away an undivided humanity, the story is about a world going under and a different world being handed back — and it is always the second world, the one after, that the tellers are living in. That is why the Kaingang and the Bororo do not put their ancestors in a boat. They put them at the bottom. The drowned are the important ones. They go into the mountain, and they come out as the halves that make a marriage possible, and the whole point of the flood is that the people telling it are descended from the ones who did not make it to the top.

Mapped traditions