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Goddess Stories: Húanaxu

With this season, we begin a new feature: a quarterly goddess story, presenting important goddesses from around the world whose stories are rarely told but who offer inspirational or challenging ideas for feminist pagans. The information comes from the new edition of the classic book, Goddesses and Heroines by Patricia Monaghan, which will be published by Praeger-Greenwood in 2010.

Húanaxu

The mythology of the Yamana people of Tierra del Fuego, at the farthest southern extreme of South America, is known today only because of the region’s female storytellers. They recited the ancient tales to non-native missionaries and anthropologists, who recorded the information and who are credited with its authorship. Especially important was Nelly Lawrence, a Yamana woman married to a white man, and a middle-aged woman known only as Julia. Without their work, the myths of the Yamana people may have been lost during the period of colonization.

Among the tales these women recited for transcribers was the story of Húanaxu (or Hanuxéakuxipa), one of the primal ancestors, who was the spirit of the moon and wife of the rainbow-god. She was the women’s leader, and as such as leader of all the people, because at that time women ruled.

She brought her people from an unknown land to the east to a place called Yáiaasaága, where they settled and built villages. There the women performed all the necessary rituals while the men did housework and raised children. Some talented male hunters provided the women with meat, because the women could not be bothered with hunting or gathering, busy as they were with the socially important work of religion.

The men felt oppressed by their work, but they were frightened by the powerful spirits that came to earth when the women did ritual. But then Húanaxu’s brother-in-law overheard two girls at the bathing place, discussing how they would impersonate spirits in order to frighten the men. Furious at being tricked, the men killed all the women except the very old and the very young. After that, the men took over the rituals and made the women do housework and tend babies. If the women were ever to find out the secret of their lost power, the myths say, the power would pass again to them.

Húanaxu was furious at the women’s loss of status. Surviving the massacre, she rose into the sky, causing a great flood that wiped out many of the Yamana people. She can be seen in the sky, still bearing the scars from the great battle of men against women.