Tupã (mythology)

Tupã or Tupan (also Tupave or Tenondete) is the word for God in the Tupi and Guarani languages, including the Guarani creation myth.[1] Tupã is considered to be the creator of the universe, of humanity and of the spirits of good and evil in Guarani mythology referred to as Angatupyry and Tau respectively. Tupã is more specifically considered the creator of light and his residence is the Sun.[2][3]

As a post-conquest deity

According to Daniel H. Candido and Lucí H. Nunes of the University of Campinas, Tupã was "not exactly a god, but rather a manifestation of" God, "in the form of thunder"; he claims that the Jesuit evangelizers of the time would have mistranslated it as an actual divinity. The god in question would be Nhanderuvuçu, cited as the Tupi-Guarani supreme deity, with "Tupã" being mentioned only as a term for the phenomenon of lightning and thunder, described at different times as a "messenger" and "demon", while the term "Nhanderuete" would be more fitting as a comparison to the Christian god.[4]

Câmara Cascudo has spoken about Tupã being a "work of adaptation of catechism, that already existed in concept for the Amerindians, but as the "sound of thunder" (tu-pá or tu-pã), an unknown (and therefore feared) phenomenon. Osvaldo Orico was of the opinion that "the supreme being's voice was heard in storms", as tupã-cinunga, "the thunder", whose reflection was tupãberaba, "the lightning".

Myths

Creation of human race

Before the creation of the human race, Tupã wedded the goddess Arasy, the mother of the sky whose home was the Moon. According to the myth, Tupã and Arasy descended upon the Earth one morning after their wedding, and together they created the rivers and the seas, the forests, the stars and all the living beings of the universe. It is said that the location they stood while creating these things was atop a hill in Areguá, a small city in Paraguay near the capital of Asunción.[5]

After the creation of all things in earth, Tupã set to creating the first human couple on the earth. For his creation, Tupã used a mixture of clay, juice extracted from yerba mate, blood from the Short-tailed Nighthawk, the leaves of several kinds of plants, and finally a centipede. He made a paste of this mixture, using the waters from a nearby spring that would become Lake Ypacaraí. From this paste Tupã created a pair of statues in his image, and left them in the sun to dry and filled them with life. The newly created humans were placed in front of the gods, and the woman was named Sypave (literally "mother of the people") by Arasy, and the man was named Rupave (literally "father of the people") by Tupã. Tupã and Arasy counselled the humans to live peacefully, to procreate, and to live in peace. Tupã then created the spirits of good and evil, Angatupyry and Tau, and left them to guide the people down one path or another and departed back into the heavens.[6]

Further reading

References
  1. Specters of the West and the Politics of Translation by Naoki Sakai, Yukiko Hanawa
  2. COLMAN, Narciso R. (Rosicrán): Ñande Ypy Kuéra ("Nuestros antepasados"), 1929. Online version Archived 2007-09-30 at the Wayback Machine
  3. SHAPIRO, JUDITH (February 1987). "from Tupã to the land without evil: the Christianization of Tupi-Guarani cosmology". American Ethnologist. 14 (1): 126–139. doi:10.1525/ae.1987.14.1.02a00080. ISSN 0094-0496.
  4. MYTHOLOGY AND CLIMATOLOGY: A STUDY OF THE DEITIES RELATED TO THE OCCURRENCE OF SEVERE WEATHER Revistas - UFPR - acessado em 21 de junho de 2017
  5. 1937-, Leeming, David Adams (2010). Creation myths of the world : an encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO. ISBN 978-1-59884-174-9. OCLC 699635147.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  6. JECUPE., KAKA WERA (2020). TUPA TENONDE;A CRIACAO DO UNIVERSO, DA TERRA E DO HOMEM SEGUNDO A TRADICAO ORAL GUARANI. EDITORA PEIROPOLIS. ISBN 65-86028-21-3. OCLC 1195708920.
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