Mother of the Sun and Moon

The mother of the transformer twins was not born but carved: the demiurge grandfather shaped her from the noble wood that the Xingu peoples reserve for effigies and gave her to the Jaguar as a wife. Pregnant with the Sun and Moon, she was killed before their birth, and the twins were taken living from her body. Their choice not to revive her, but to honor her instead with a wooden image, made her the first of the mourned dead and the prototype of the effigy at the center of the region's great memorial ceremony. Because chiefs, like the demiurges, are said to be made of that same noble wood, every chief who dies is commemorated after her pattern, so that her death stands as the origin of both human mortality and the rite that answers it.

Parentage

• parent: KwamutiEllen B. Basso, A Musical View of the Universe (1985) (secondary)

Children

• Moon
• Sun

Domains

• origin of mourning
• womanhood

Powers

• become the first mourned effigy

Relations

• parent: KwamutiEllen B. Basso, A Musical View of the Universe (1985) (secondary)
• lover: the JaguarEllen B. Basso, A Musical View of the Universe (1985) (secondary)
• child: SunOrlando Villas Bôas & Cláudio Villas Bôas, Xingu: The Indians, Their Myths (1973) (secondary)
• child: MoonOrlando Villas Bôas & Cláudio Villas Bôas, Xingu: The Indians, Their Myths (1973) (secondary)

Sources

• The mother of the Sun and Moon was a woman carved from wood, given to the Jaguar; her death and commemoration by a wooden effigy originate the memorial rite for the dead: Ellen B. Basso, A Musical View of the Universe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985) (secondary); Orlando Villas Bôas & Cláudio Villas Bôas, Xingu: The Indians, Their Myths (1973) (secondary)