Yatoʼ Yos

Yatoʼ Yos, 'Our Grandfather God,' is the supreme and most remote divinity of the Yanesha, occupying the grandfather generation of a pantheon ordered on a three-generation kinship model. At the beginning of time he molded the flat earth and the first beings from a paste of dirt and breast milk obtained from his mother or sister, and by breathing upon them endowed the ancestors of humans, plants, animals and even some objects with a portion of his own divine soul, the camuequeñets. It was he who, in the second cosmic era, sent down the flower that impregnated the mother of the solar divinity Yompor Ror. His name fuses the Yanesha honorific yatoʼ with the Spanish Dios, marking the colonial encounter through which the older high god was recast in Christian terms.

Domains

• creation
• divine soul

Powers

• molds the first beings from earth and breast milk
• insufflates a fraction of divine soul into creation

Epithets

• Yatoʼ Yos — Our Grandfather GodFernando Santos-Granero, The Power of Love, 1991 (secondary)

Relations

• sibling: YosoperFernando Santos-Granero, The Power of Love, 1991, on Yosoper as classificatory brother of the creator (secondary)

Sources

• Yatoʼ Yos is the supreme creator divinity who made humans, plants, animals and all good things at the beginning of time, forming them from earth and breast milk and animating them with his divine breath.: Fernando Santos-Granero, The Power of Love: The Moral Use of Knowledge amongst the Amuesha of Central Peru, Athlone Press, 1991, ch. 2 (secondary); Fernando Santos-Granero, 'Writing History into the Landscape,' American Ethnologist 25(2), 1998 (secondary)