A Young Man and the Star (Xerente star myth)
"A Young Man and the Star" is a myth from the Xerente people, an indigenous group in Brazil, highlighting themes of beauty, curiosity, and the reverence and danger associated with celestial beings. The story revolves around a young man who longs for a star of his own and is eventually visited by a star personified as a beautiful young woman. As he interacts with her, he is drawn into a mystical experience that leads him to the sky world, where he becomes curious about a festive gathering that he is warned not to approach. Ignoring this caution, he witnesses a disturbing dance of skeletons, which frightens him and prompts his return to the earth. The myth concludes with the young man's death shortly after recounting his adventure, suggesting that exploration of the unknown, particularly the heavens, can come with dire consequences. This narrative reflects the Xerente's view of celestial bodies, where the sun is worshiped as a supreme god, while the moon and stars are seen as ominous figures associated with death. The myth serves as a cautionary tale about the curiosity surrounding the afterlife and the complex relationship the Xerente people hold with the cosmos.
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Subject Terms
A Young Man and the Star (Xerente star myth)
Author: Traditional Brazilian
Time Period: 1001 CE– 1500 CE
Country or Culture: South America
Genre: Myth
PLOT SUMMARY
The Xerente star myth tells the story of a young man who is drawn to the vast beauty of the night sky. He laments that he cannot have a star of his own to admire at any time. He awakes in the middle of the night to find a star beside him, personified as a young woman. The man greatly admires her beauty. The star-girl asks the young man to gather a cluster of fruit from a tree for her. As the young man ascends the tree, the star-girl strikes it with a magic wand, where it grows in height until it reaches the heavens, or sky world.
Once they enter the sky world, the young man is intrigued by the sounds of festivity and the dancing and songs he hears nearby. The star-girl forbids him to go and investigate the activity, but when she leaves him alone momentarily, he gives in to his curiosity. What he witnesses is the dance of the dead, a hideous gang of skeletons dancing amid an odor of rotting flesh.
The young man returns to the tree in fear, and it sinks back into the earth. As he does so, the star-girl calls after him, saying that even if he leaves, he will return to her soon. The myth does indeed end with the young man dying shortly after telling his people the story of his adventure. It can be assumed that, despite their reverence for things celestial, the divine fate of humankind was, to the Xerentes, essentially unknowable and even potentially dangerous to consider.
SIGNIFICANCE
The Xerentes (alternately spelled Cherentes or Sherentés) are one of several indigenous peoples of Brazil whose mythology survived through a tradition of oral storytelling passed down from one generation to another. While there is little scholarly writing on the Xerentes and their mythological canon, they—like other numerous indigenous cultures all across the world—adopted a divine reverence for the sky and the celestial bodies within it. The Xerentes held the sun as their supreme god and object of worship. The moon and the stars, conversely, took on an antagonistic role, often illustrated as cult-like figures closely associated with death.
Observers of Xerente festivals related to death noted the people’s use of long poles, which symbolized an interaction between humans and each heavenly world. The poles can be directly correlated to the Xerente star myth above, which was extracted from the tribe’s oral tradition and recorded by the nineteenth-century anthropologist José Feliciano de Oliveira, who studied the tribe at length and penned perhaps the quintessential text about the tribe. Oliveira regards the Xerente star myth as an assertion that the tribe held little belief in the notion that salvation or eternal happiness awaited them in the afterlife. Rather, the Xerente star myth paints celestial beings as desirable but ultimately malevolent harbingers of doom.
The Xerente star myth also adopts several narrative features that scholars have found to be common in the mythology of indigenous Brazilian tribes, most notably the illustration of the unification of heaven and earth by the rapid and wondrous growth of a tree or rock.
The death of the young man at the conclusion of the narrative also paints a rather grim picture with regard to the exploration of fate amongst the Xerentes, for it seems to imply that those curious about the afterlife or the heavens themselves do so at their own peril.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alexander, Hartley Burr. The Mythology of All Races: Latin-American. Vol. 11. Boston: Jones, 1920. Print.
Bierhorst, John. The Mythology of South America. New York: Oxford UP, 2002. Print.
Bingham, Ann, and Jeremy Roberts. South and Meso-American Mythology A to Z. 2nd ed. New York: Chelsea, 2010. Print.
Gifford, Douglas, and John Sibbick. Warriors, Gods and Spirits from Central & South American Mythology. New York: Schocken, 1987. Print.
Oliveira, José Feliciano de. The Cherentes of Central Brazil. London: Congress of Americanists, 1913. Print.