BOTH] KO EVIDENCE OF BELIEF IN A SUPREME BEING 119 



it happened that the little china dolls which Koch-Griinberg (i, 184) 

 presented to the women and claildren on the Alary River (Rio Negro) 

 were generally called tupdna: the people took them for figures of saints 

 from missionary times. 



3. Conversely, it is interesting to note how both travelers and 

 missionaries have assumed almost unconsciously the Indian tradi- 

 tions of certain mythic Heroes to be more or less indicative of the 

 view no doubt a priori conscientiously held by the former that the 

 native was not without the knowledge of a God. Thus, Hilliouse 

 (HiC, 244) wTiting in 1832, makes the statement, bhndly followed, 

 strangely enough, by Schomburgk (ScR, ii, .319) in 1848, that "The 

 Indians acknowledge the existence of a superior divinity, the universal 

 creator; and most tribes, also, believe in a subservient power, whose 

 particular province is the protection of their nation. Amongst the 

 Arawaaks, Aluberi is the supreme being, and Kururumanny the god or 

 patron {Schutz gott) of the Arawaak nation, " etc. With regard to the 

 former there is a very probable reference to him under the name of 

 Hubuiri, some three centuries previously, in the Arcliivos de Indias: 

 Patronato (quoted by Rodway in Timehri for 1895, p. 9), where, in an 

 account of the Provinces and Nations of the Aruacas [Arawaks] by 

 Rodrigo de Navarrete, the latter says: "■ From those whom I have fre- 

 quently kept in my house, I hav«> understood that their belief and object 

 of adoration is the firmament or heavens, because they say that in the 

 gi-eater heaven there is a poweriul lord and a great lady . . . when 

 they die, their souls will go with Hubuiri, as they call the great and 

 powerful lord in heaven. " This same Alubiri, or Huliuiri, is still rec- 

 ognizable as Ilaburi (Sect. 9) in the stories related by me, and as 

 Abore, the WaiTau "Father of Inventions" in the legend told by 

 Brett (BrB,7(i). In his Arawak vocabulary the name for God is given 

 by Schomburgk (ScR,ii, 51.5) asKururuniaimi: Brett (Br,58), however, 

 is more correct in saying that it is the Warraus who "sometimes 

 use the word 'Korroromana' when speaking of God; but it is doubtful 

 what ideas some of them attach to that name." As a matter of fact, 

 both of these would-be deities, Alubiri (Sect. 3) and Kororomanna 

 (Sect. 19), were Arawak and Warrau Tribal Heroes, respectively. 

 Similar remarks may be made of Makunaima and Pia (Sects. 29-^1), 

 and of Amalivaca (Sect. ^2). The name Amalivaca is spread over 

 a region of more than five thousand square leagues. 



He is f ounddesignated as "the father of mankind," or " our great grandfather, "as far 

 as to the Carribbee nations. . . . Amalivaca is not originally the Great Spirit, the 

 Aged of Heaven, the invisible being, whose worship springs from that of the powers of 

 natiure, when nations rise insensibly to the consciousness of the unity of these powers; 

 he is rather a personage of the heroic times, a man, who, coming from afar, lived in the 

 land of the Tamanacs and the Caribs, sculptured si,Tnbolic figures upon the rocks, 

 and disappeared by going back to the country he had previously inhabited beyond the 

 ocean. [.^.VH, ii, 474.] 



