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In the list of Taurepang oral traditions personal narratives,
together with the myths whose theme is the exploits of
the creator hero Makunaíma, are referred to as
pandon, a term translated by the Taurepang as ‘stories’.
The events retold in the myths take place in a time the
Taurepang call Pia daktai, a ‘time of origin’,
when the earth, people and animals took on the shape they
have today. In contrast, an individual narrative describing
the narrator’s life and family are held to have happened
‘now’, sereware, indicating that they deal with
events much more recent than those that occurred in the
Pia daktai.
Changing from one type of narrative to the other does
not obey any kind of rule. Nothing stops a narrator moving
from an account of the exploits of Makunaíma in
the region of Mount Roraima to another about a village
situated in the same place when the narrator was young.
There is a kind of compression of type as the narrative
approaches the present, a time of greater detail and memories.
Makunaíma
The most important cycle in Taurepang mythology deals
with the saga of the cultural hero Makunaíma, sometimes
referred to as a single character, at others as a group
of brothers, as for example in the account collected by
father C. de Armellada (1964:32ss). In the ‘time
of origin’ men and animals possessed human form,
pemon-pe. Sharing with the other earthly beings a pre-social
existence, the Makunaíma brothers, born out of
the union between the sun Wei and a women made of clay,
wandered in search of their father who had been captured
by the Mawari, malevolent spirits living inside the mountains.
In the Mount Roraima region they rediscovered their captive
father who, once free of his captors, rose into the heavens
leaving his children behind on earth.
The Makunaíma brothers remained wandering near
Mount Roraima, following animals (amongst which the coati,
akuri) in search of food. It was this animal that showed
the hero the ‘tree of the world’, wadaka, from
which they gathered all the edible fruits. Overjoyed with
its abundance, in an act of immeasurable greed, Makunaíma
felled the tree. Water spilled out of what remained of
the trunk, causing a great flood. The deluge was followed
by a great fire which destroyed men and animals. Following
this cataclysm, Makunaíma created new men and new
animals out of clay, giving them life (Koch-Grunberg,
1924/1981, II:43; Armellada, 1964:60). The Taurepang recount
that Mount Roraima is the root of the tree that remained
after the great flood, pointing out that its shape is
similar to that of a tree stump, despite its immense size.
Out of all the exploits of Makunaíma this is the
episode most commonly referred to. In several others,
the hero transforms the various beings he comes across
into rocks. In the end Makunaíma departs eastwards,
to the other side of Mount Roraima, leaving behind a world
in which several of his exploits remain crystallized,
principally in the rocky outcrops of the Taurepang territory.
Afterwards Makunaíma never again interfered with
mankind, leaving behind a sad legacy: the world to which
mankind was confined no longer possessed the same nature
as had lived before the felling of the great tree. The
‘now’ beings, sereware, lost the identity they
previous had; they were no longer all Pemon. Thus changeability
came into the world.
If before all things were people, pemon-pe to ichipue,
after the great flood the different characters that appear
in the pandon would differentiate themselves from mankind,
occupying other domains and begetting new relationships
with human beings, of an explicitly antagonistic nature.
Upatá and Taren
The Taurepang give particular emphasis to the notion of
Upatá, representing the place of birth or residence.
This notion, here translated as ‘my place’,
corresponds to the village and denotes not simply the
physical space, but a space that is above all social.
Whilst a house is patasek, upatá means more appropriately
‘home’.
In the Taurepang territory there are places of illness,
the enek-patá, and places that are good for the
establishment of villages, the wakipe-patá. It
is between these extremes, from the former in the direction
of the latter, that groups migrate.
Although aware that they are surrounded by a highly varied
set of hidden beings, the Taurepang are not always able
to provide a complete list of them all. A more sophisticated
understanding of these issues forms the territory of the
shaman, as well as of a vast repertory of magical invocations
known as Taren. In their day-to-day use, these invocations
serve to cure simple illnesses for which the intervention
of a shaman is not required, such as snakebites, small
wounds, low fevers, diarrhoea and so on.
The taren appear to be based on events that took place
in the Pia daktai. They act in opposition to those evils
introduced into the world in this initial period by
the cultural heroes. The Taren are therefore always
introduced by a mythical tale that recounts the origin
of the evil it seeks to counter. This is followed by
a series of repeated phrases which ‘nominate’
an agent possessing the opposite nature to the disturbance
the Taren aims to remedy.
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