Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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This Mountain Is The
Ararat Of The Aramean Or Semitic Nations, And The Tlaloc Or Colhuacan
Of The Mexicans.
Amalivaca, sailing in his bark, engraved the figures
of the moon and the sun on the Painted Rock (Tepumereme) of
Encaramada.
Some blocks of granite piled upon one another, and forming
a kind of cavern, are still called the house or dwelling of the great
forefather of the Tamanacs. The natives show also a large stone near
this cavern, in the plains of Maita, which they say was an instrument
of music, the drum of Amalivaca. We must here observe, that this
heroic personage had a brother, Vochi, who helped him to give the
surface of the earth its present form. The Tamanacs relate that the
two brothers, in their system of perfectibility, sought, at first, to
arrange the Orinoco in such a manner, that the current of the water
could always be followed either going down or going up the river. They
hoped by this means to spare men trouble in navigating rivers; but,
however great the power of these regenerators of the world, they could
never contrive to give a double slope to the Orinoco, and were
compelled to relinquish this singular plan. Amalivaca had daughters,
who had a decided taste for travelling. The tradition states,
doubtless with a figurative meaning, that he broke their legs, to
render them sedentary, and force them to people the land of the
Tamanacs. After having regulated everything in America, on that side
of the great water, Amalivaca again embarked, and returned to the
other shore, to the same place from whence he came. Since the natives
have seen the missionaries arrive, they imagine that Europe is this
other shore; and one of them inquired with great simplicity of Father
Gili, whether he had there seen the great Amalivaca, the father of the
Tamanacs, who had covered the rocks with symbolic figures.
These notions of a great convulsion of nature; of two human beings
saved on the summit of a mountain, and casting behind them the fruits
of the mauritia palm-tree, to repeople the earth; of that national
divinity, Amalivaca, who arrived by water from a distant land, who
prescribed laws to nature, and forced the nations to renounce their
migrations; these various features of a very ancient system of belief,
are well worthy of attention. What the Tamanacs, and the tribes whose
languages are analogous to the Tamanac tongue, now relate to us, they
have no doubt learned from other people, who inhabited before them the
same regions. The name of Amalivaca is spread over a region of more
than five thousand square leagues; he is found designated as the
father of mankind, or our great grandfather, as far as to the Caribbee
nations, whose idiom approaches the Tamanac only in the same degree as
the German approaches the Greek, the Persian, and the Sanscrit.
Amalivaca is not originally the Great Spirit, the Aged of Heaven, the
invisible being, whose worship springs from that of the powers of
nature, when nations rise insensibly to the consciousness of the unity
of these powers; he is rather a personage of the heroic times, a man,
who, coming from afar, lived in the land of the Tamanacs and the
Caribs, sculptured symbolic figures upon the rocks, and disappeared by
going back to the country he had previously inhabited beyond the
ocean.
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