Table of Contents
The Mbyá Guaraní of Paraguay tell of a world made, drowned and made again. The fullest record of these sacred texts is Ayvu rapyta (The Foundation of the Word), gathered by the Paraguayan researcher León Cadogan and published in full in 1959 by the University of São Paulo. Its sixth chapter, Yvy Ru’o, is the flood, and its seventh, Yvy Pyaú, is the new earth. The story is part of a larger cycle of creations and endings, and it ties into the hope of reaching Yvy Marã Ey, the Land without Evil.
The First Earth
In the Mbyá account the supreme being, Ñamandú, creates himself in the primal darkness. He is also called Ñanderuvusu or Ñanderuguasu, Our Great Father. Ñamandú then makes the other chief gods, among them Jakaira, the master of mist and of the pipe smoke that inspires shamans, and Tupã, the master of water, rain and thunder. Together they shape the First Earth, Yvy Tenonde (also written Yvytenonde). Ñamandú rests it on two crossed rods and holds it steady with five sacred pindó palms. On this first earth people lived beside the gods, there was no illness, and food never ran short.
The Transgression
The end came through incest, the gravest taboo. In the version drawn from Cadogan’s texts, a man named Jeupie lay with his father’s sister.
The Deluge
The gods answered with a great flood, the Mba’e-meg̃ua guasu, which destroyed the First Earth, and then they withdrew to a dwelling in the sky. Cadogan’s table of contents for the flood chapter names two outcomes: the passage of the virtuous and the metempsychosis of sinners. In retellings the virtuous rise to the heavens and the wicked are turned into animals.
The Paraguayan writer Girala Yampey (1923 to 2018) tells a version taken from the sacred hymns. In it the flood starts as a great forest fire coming from the west. It burns everything in its path, and the land begins to crumble into the abyss. Ñanderuguasu puts out the fire with heavy rains that never stop, which save the earth from falling but cover it completely with water. Only one Guaraní couple survives. They climb a pindó palm and cling to its crown, and as the water rises the palm grows with it, so the flood never reaches them.
The Second Earth
After the flood Ñamandú decides to make a second, imperfect earth and asks Jakaira for help. Jakaira spreads the bruma vivificante, the life-giving mist, over the new land. Plants, animals and people fill it, and the survivors of the flood come to live there, but now there is illness, pain, hunger and death. Cadogan’s seventh chapter also covers the making of humanity on this new earth and the theft of fire.
Those who live on the new earth, Yvy Pyahu, long to return to the first one, the Land without Evil. Some oral accounts speak of a third remaking that will have no flaws, and say that people can reach the Land without Evil even now if they keep certain rules of shared life. Yampey describes the present earth as doomed to be ruined in turn, to be followed by a third earth without imperfections. This hope is often linked to the migrations that Guaraní shamans and prophets led in search of that land, which some accounts place toward the rising sun in the east.
Cadogan on the First Earth
In the final chapter of Ayvu rapyta, Cadogan asks whether the sacred texts might be a trace of some past civilisation from Yvy Tenonde, which he calls the Atlantis of Guaraní prehistory. He adds at once that his knowledge does not allow him to put forward any hypothesis on the origin of those verses.
For flood stories from other peoples, see flood stories from around the world and the deluge legends of America.
