The stories the
culture thinks with.

How to read these.

Every story here reaches us through Peter G. Roe, an American anthropologist who taped them on the middle Ucayali, principally around San Francisco de Yarinacocha, and published them in 1982. The tellers are named where he named them. That matters twice over: it tells you whose version this is, and it tells you that it is a version. A story told on the Pisqui may run differently. A story told today certainly will.

What follows is not "Shipibo mythology". It is four or five stories, from a handful of people, in one stretch of one river, half a century ago. Read them that way and they are worth a great deal. Read them as the collected beliefs of a nation and you have made the mistake this site exists to avoid.

Yoashico, the miserable one.

Told by a Shipibo man named Eduardo and written down in the 1970s. It is an origin story for four things at once: fire, cultivated food, the movement of the sun, and why birds are coloured the way they are.

In the old time the sun stood still in the east and did not move. There was no fire. People laid the fish they caught on a leaf and let the standing sun warm it. Only the stingy one, Shäno Inca, had fire — and he had paranta, the plantain, and atsa, the manioc, and he meant to keep all three.

He guarded the manioc the way a man guards something he has no intention of sharing: a viper coiled in the crotch of the plant, another around the stem, wasps in the leaves. When people asked him for manioc he destroyed the growing eyes before handing it over, so nothing they planted would come up. When they asked for plantain shoots he cut the trunk in three pieces and gave them that. They planted it. Nothing grew.

What undid him was a bird and a girl not paying attention. His daughter kept a green parakeet, the vëscón. She was sweeping the plaza around her hut and it got behind her, crying at her — and while she was at a distance it stole a coal out of her fire. She threw her brush at it. It flew off low to the ground and left the coal on the branch of a dead tree at the corner of her father’s garden, and the branch began to burn.

Shäno Inca sent a tempest to put it out. Then every kind of bird came and stood over the fire with their wings spread to shield it from the rain — the vultures, the razor-billed curassow, all of them. Their feathers had been white. The smoke turned them black, and they have been black since. The coal dropped, and the ancestors picked it up and broke it into pieces and shared it out. And the sun began to move.

Then they had fire and still no crops, so they dug a pit for him. The lizard dug the first one and it only came up to his stomach; he climbed out and they could not kill him. So they called the jori bird, which digs deep, chambered nests underground, and asked whether it could do better. It could. They covered the hole with leaves and a skin of earth and invited him out for the arrow match the way they always did — he answered from inside his hut and came jumping, bow ready — and he fell, and they killed him with arrows and dragged him out.

The birds came and bathed in the blood, and that is where they got their colours: the red macaw, the pish-pish. Only the cainqui had gone fishing, and fishing always took him a long time, and by the time he got back the blood had dried. That is why he is a dull orange to this day.

Recorded by Peter G. Roe from Eduardo and published in The Cosmic Zygote, Rutgers University Press, 1982, pp. 68–69, with Roe’s spellings. Retold here in our own words; the version that matters is the one a Shipibo teller gives, and when we have one recorded we will put it here beside this. The same passage preserves an everyday thing worth as much as the myth — how you announce yourself at a house: the visitor calls out, the owner answers welcome, and the visitor answers again.

The giant eagle and the clay man.

A giant eagle was taking Shipibo people as they passed through Cocama territory on the Huallaga, on their way to get salt. It would come down out of the mountains — chá, chá, chá — and carry someone off to its cave. In the telling, the one it takes is the man covered in designs, his whole body painted: the person who is seen.

The answer came from a Cocama, not a Shipibo. Make a false person out of clay, he said. So they modelled a man, dressed him in a tari and put a handkerchief over his head, and set him in the prow of the canoe. Then they made noise — beating the paddles on the sides, calling out in the high falsetto people use to carry a voice across water.

The eagle heard, turned its head looking for the source, and came. Tojh! — the sound of talons striking mud. Its claws stuck fast in the clay, the weight took it down into the river, and the piranhas finished it. After that, the story says, people could go and get salt and come to no harm.

Worth noticing The rescuer is a foreigner. Shipibo myth in this collection repeatedly rates the shamans of neighbouring peoples — the Cocama, the Campa — as more powerful than their own, and has them arrive to solve what the Shipibo cannot. That is not a people mythologising their own supremacy. It is a people with neighbours, a foreign policy, and a sense of humour about themselves.