Conceptions of the sky

SEP 08, 2011

As some cultures have many words for describing snow, others have similar concepts for the night sky.

Charles Day

The other day I stumbled across an intriguing paper on the arXiv e-print server. Written by Guillermo Sequera of Paraguay’s National Secretariat of Culture and Alejandro Gangui of the University of Buenos Aires, the paper bears the title “The Tomárâho conception of the sky.”

The Tomárâho are an ethnic aboriginal group whose members live in part of the Gran Chaco, an arid, flat, Alaska-sized region that encompasses parts of Bolivia, Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil. The photo below, taken by Mark Hoschek , shows a sunset in the Paraguayan Gran Chaco.

Perhaps because their homeland is far from the Paraguay River, the Tomárâho were not subdued by the first wave of Spanish colonists who reached the Gran Chaco in the 16h century. But, as Sequera and Gangui recount in their paper, by the end of the 19th century, an Anglo-Argentinian conglomerate had appropriated the Tomárâho land and impressed the Tomárâho people to chop down the local hardwood trees for timber.

Sequera lived among the Tomárâho in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He saw for himself the poor conditions that the people still endure. He also discovered that the Tomárâho have—and continue to have—a rich, mythical conception of the heavens, Earth, and the underworld.

To fully appreciate the Tomárâho conception of the sky, you should read Sequera and Gangui’s paper. Here’s a short summary of the six above-ground strata. They came into existence following the catastrophic collapse of the giant tree that supported the Tomárâho universe in the distant past.

Porr iut(lower sky), the solid, dry abode of men that extends to the height of the tallest palm tree.

Porr pehet(half sky), the humid zone where clouds form and rain originates. The abode of rushbirds and storm spirits.

Porr pixt(true sky), the zone of thick fog where Lapyxe the rainmaker and other spirits live alongside the Sun and Moon.

Porr yhyr(high sky), the location of Venus and the other planets, the stars, and the Milky Way. “With the exception of a few particularly visionary shamans,” write Sequera and Gangui, “nobody has the power to enter this distant and profound sky.”

Porr uhur(horizon sky), the threshold between the known and unknown.

Porr nahnyk (cold sky), “an indefinite space which goes beyond the inner skies, the region where the universe extends and the unknown predominates. It is a profound, airless sky,” write Sequera and Gangui.

When I read Sequera and Gangui’s paper, I tried in vain to remember my first impression of the night sky. I grew up in Conwy, a small old town on the coast of North Wales. There, the air is always moist and the skies are often cloudy. I didn’t knowingly see the Milky Way until, at the age of 27, I visited a beach at night in a remote part of Kyushu, Japan.

By then I was an astrophysicist. My scientific conception of the cosmos corresponded more or less to the last and most forbidding of the Tomárâho’s six strata. Now, as a writer, I value the creativity that went into conceiving the Tomárâho universe. And I’m grateful to Sequera and Gangui for recording and interpreting it for us.