BORORO LEGENDS 
The Bororos also said that the stars were the houses 
of deceased children. 
They believed that the sky vault, or heaven, formed 
part of the earth, and was inhabited. They proved this 
by saying that the vulture could be seen flying higher and 
higher until it disappeared. It went to perch and rest 
upon trees in heaven. The Milky Way in the sky —the 
kuyedje e J redduddo (literally translated “ stars they 
cinders ”) — consisted for them merely of the flying 
cinders from the burning stars. 
The sun, they stated, was made up entirely of dead 
barih J or medicine-men, who rose daily with red-hot irons 
before their faces. The barihs prowled about the earth at 
night, and went to the east in the morning on their return 
to the sun. The hot irons held by the barihs were merely 
held in order to warm the people on earth. At sunset 
the orb of day “ came down to the water ” beyond the 
horizon, and from there marched back to the east. The 
Bororos maintained that the heavy and regular footsteps 
of the sun walking across the earth at night could be heard 
plainly. 
The moon, which was masculine to the Bororos, was 
the brother of the sun, and was similarly the home of 
barihs of minor importance. 
The legends of the Bororos were generally long and 
somewhat confused. They were the outcome of ex¬ 
tremely imaginative and extraordinarily retentive minds. 
Their imagination frequently ran away with them, so 
that it was not always easy to transcribe the legends so 
as to render them intelligible to the average reader, 
unaccustomed to the peculiar way of thinking and 
reasoning of savages. Yet there was generally a certain 
amount of humorous vraisemblance in their most im¬ 
possible stories. Their morals, it should be remembered, 
were not quite the same as ours. There were frequently 
interminable descriptive details which one could on no 
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