Ayawa

The Ayawa, the Thunders, are four brother culture-heroes who shaped the ancestral landscape. Coming up the Milk River and passing through the Water Door, they drove the sacred Yuruparí trumpets before them like ploughs, and where the instruments cut the earth the valleys and waterfalls of the world were formed. As thunder beings they belong to the sky and to the season of storms, and as bearers of the He instruments they carry the voice and bones of the ancestors into the human world, linking the making of the land to the origin of the flutes that sound at initiation. They move through the same myth cycle as the hero Warimi, and Barasana narrators treat the four as a single acting body even while distinguishing them.

Domains

• thunder
• culture hero

Powers

• carve valleys and waterfalls with the sacred trumpets

Epithets

• Ayawa — the ThundersStephen Hugh-Jones, The Palm and the Pleiades (Cambridge University Press, 1979) (secondary)

Relations

• kin: WarimiThe thunder culture-heroes belong with Warimi in the He myth cycle.Stephen Hugh-Jones, The Palm and the Pleiades (Cambridge University Press, 1979) (secondary)
• associate: He AnacondaThey travel the same ancestral waters as the He anaconda, bearing the ancestral instruments.Christine Hugh-Jones, From the Milk River (Cambridge University Press, 1979) (secondary)

Sources

• Four culture heroes, the Ayawa or Thunders, came up the Milk River through the Water Door, pushing the Yuruparí trumpets before them as ploughs and creating valleys and waterfalls.: Christine Hugh-Jones, From the Milk River (Cambridge University Press, 1979) (secondary); Stephen Hugh-Jones, The Palm and the Pleiades (Cambridge University Press, 1979) (secondary)