Sun

The Sun is the elder of the two transformer-heroes at the heart of Upper Xingu cosmology, which the Mehinaku share with their neighbors. Born together with his twin the Moon from a woman whom the demiurge had fashioned from wood and given to the Jaguar, he grew to remake the primordial world into its present order, fixing the geography, the peoples, and the institutions of the region. He is a cunning being who works by trickery, and it was he and his brother who established that human beings must die: declining to bring their own mother back to life, they honored her instead with a carved wooden effigy, and so founded the memorial ceremony for the dead. Sources across the Xingu give the elder twin cognate names, the Kalapalo calling him Taugi, and the Mehinaku identify him with the sun itself.

Parentage

• Mother of the Sun and Moon
• the Jaguar

Domains

• solar order
• world transformation
• mortality

Powers

• transform the primordial world into its present form
• establish human mortality
• prevail by trickery

Epithets

• the great transformer

Relations

• twin: Moon
• parent: Mother of the Sun and Moon
• parent: the Jaguar

Sources

• Ellen B. Basso, A Musical View of the Universe: Kalapalo Myth and Ritual Performances (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985)
• Thomas Gregor, Mehinaku (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977)