The fig tree master and the origin of Jesus: a shamanical critique of christianity
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.11606/2179-0892.ra.2014.87761Keywords:
Guarani, Mbya, Tupi-Guarani, shamanism, ethnology, mythology, christianity, Jesus, missions.Abstract
In this paper, I present a discussion focused on a narrative about the “origin of Jesus” (or Tupãra’y: Tupã’s son), collected in a Guarani village located in Vale do Ribeira/São Paulo, Brazil. This narrative, which evokes a series of logical correspondences between the origin of white people and that of Guarani people, leads us to a discussion about the importance of horizontal shamanism (Hugh-Jones, 1994) in healing procedures, by situating the native interpretation about the episode of the descending of Jesus on the terrestrial platform as just one amongst many others in which the agency of the spirits from Tupã’s celestial house circulate in our world in retaliation (-jepy) for misfortunes performed by invisible beings (jaexa va’e’ỹ kuery), more specifically the spirit-owner of the fig tree. The discussion will then lead us to a shamanic critique (Albert, 2002) of the “Christian guilt complex” that arises from a dialogue between the Guarani old man who narrates this story and a Christian missionary who tried in vain to convince him of his responsibility for the death of Jesus. Further in this paper I explore the procedures by which Guarani cosmology has incorporated the missionary narrative to criticize its view, assigning a status of incomplete truth to Christian religion, which mistakenly took a “secondary” divinity by the creator of Earth. Finally, I outline hypotheses about what would be the Guarani version of what Lévi-Strauss (1993[1991]) calls the “Amerindian bipartite ideology”, based on what I call a “Platonism in perpetual disequilibrium”.
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