GOLDMAN1963-001 - ethnographic attestation
Cubeo (Kubeo)
Colombia - Cuduyari River - Vaupes - South America - Northwest Amazonia
Sacred / spirit
Source term: stone bull-roarer
Among the Cubeo of the Cuduyarí River, the shaman — the yaví, the 'jaguar' — was the one truly feared figure, said to grow more malevolent with age until he could put on a jaguar skin and take the animal's form. Irving Goldman, who lived on the river in 1939-40, set down the yaví's ways of killing at a distance: spines and crystals shot invisibly into the body, victims made to die inside their own dreams, a soul drawn down as a butterfly into a boiling pot and killed when the pot was smashed. Last on the list came a stone bullroarer. As the shaman whirled it, the victim — wherever he was — suffered as if struck with a machete.
Finally, a shaman has a stone bull-roarer. As he whirls it the victim suffers as if struck with a machete.
Irving Goldman, The Cubeo: Indians of the Northwest Amazon (1963), p. 268.
- Object
- Stone bullroarer named as a shamanic weapon; Goldman gives no cord, dimensions, shape, sound, specimen, or Cubeo term.
- Function
- Lethal sorcery: a shaman whirls a stone bullroarer so that the distant victim suffers as if struck with a machete — the last of the yaví's techniques for killing at a distance in Goldman's account.
- Map confidence
- high - Cuduyari River reference point near Mitu; Goldman names the field region, not a village or performance site.
- Source location
- p. 268 (PDF p. 280)