Continuing with some interesting information published by von Humboldt (see my previous post on pygmies and white indians), today's post will look into his comments on an ancient god who reached the interior of Venezuela, by boat, coming from a distant land beyond the ocean.
During his journey along the Orinoco in Venezuela in the year 1800, Humboldt described the myth of Amalivaca. Below is the relevant text from his work Personal narrative of travels to the equinoctial regions of the New Continent during the years 1799-1804.
This text can be found on page 597:
"All mankind or to speak more correctly all the Tamanacs were drowned with the exception of one man and one woman who saved themselves on a mountain near the banks of the Asiveru called Cuchivero by the Spaniards. This mountain is the Ararat of the Aramean or Semitic nations and the Tlaloc or Colhuacan of the Mexicans. Amalivaca sailing in his bark engraved the figures of the moon and the sun on the Painted Rock Tepumereme of Encaramada. Some blocks of granite piled upon one another and forming a kind of cavern are still called the house or dwelling of the great forefather of the Tamanacs. The natives show also a large stone near this cavern in the plains of Maita which they say was an instrument of music the drum of Amalivaca. We must here observe that this heroic personage had a brother Vochi who helped him to give the surface of the earth its present form. The Tamanacs relate that the two brothers in their system of perfectibility sought at first to arrange the Orinoco in such a manner that the current of the water could always be followed either going down or going up the river. They hoped by this means to spare men trouble in navigating rivers but however great the power of these regenerators of the world they could never contrive to give a double slope to the Orinoco and were compelled to relinquish this singular plan.
Amalivaca had daughters, who had a decided taste for travelling. The tradition says, no doubt in a figurative style, that he broke their legs, to render them sedentary, and force them to people the land of the Tamanacs. After having regulated every thing in America, on that side of the great water, Amalivaca again embarked, and “returned to the other shore,” to the same place from which he came. Since the natives have seen the missionaries arrive, they imagine, that Europe is this other shore; and one of them inquired with great simplicity of father Gili, whether he had seen the great Amalivaca yonder, the father of the Tamanacs, who had covered the rocks with symbolic figures.
These notions of a great cataclysm; of a couple saved on the summit of a mountain, and throwing behind them the fruits of the mauritia palm-tree, to repeople the Earth; of that national divinity, Amalivaca, who arrived by water from a distant land, prescribed laws to nature, and forced the nations to renounce their migrations; these various features of a very ancient system of belief, are well worthy to fix our attention. What the Tamanacs, and the tribes whose languages are analogous to the Tamanac tongue, now relate to us, they have no doubt learned from other people, who inhabited before them the same regions. The name of Amalivaca is spread over a region of more than five thousand square leagues; it is found designating the father of mankind (our great grandfather) as far as to the Caribbee nations, whose idiom approaches that of the Tamanac only in the same degree as the German approaches the Greek, the Persian, and the Sanscrit. “Amalivaca is not originally the Great Spirit; the Aged of Heaven, that invisible being, whose worship springs from that of the powers of nature, when nations rise insensibly to the sentiment of the unity of these powers; he is rather a personage of the heroic times, a man, who, coming from afar, lived in the land of the Tamanacs and the Caribbees, sculptured symbolical figures upon the rocks, and disappeared by going back to the country he had previously inhabited beyond the Ocean.
The anthropomorphitism of the divinity has two sources diametrically opposite; and this opposition seems to arise less from the various degrees of intellectual culture, than from the different dispositions of nations, some of which are more inclined to mysticism, and others more governed by the senses, and by external impressions. Sometimes man makes the divinities descend upon Earth, charging them with the care of ruling nations, and giving them laws, as in the fables of the East; sometimes, as among the Greeks and other nations of the West, they are the first monarchs, priest-kings, who are stripped of what is human in their nature to be raised to the rank of national divinities. dmalivaca was a stranger, like Manco-Capac, Bochica, and Quetzalcohuatl ; those extraordinary men, who, in the alpine or civilized part of America, on the table lands of Peru, New Grenada, and Anahuac, organized civil society, regulated the order of sacrifices, and founded religious congregations. The Mexican Quetzalcohuatl, whose descendants Montezuma thought he recognized in the companions of Cortez, displays an additional resemblance to Amalivaca, the mythologic personage of savage America, or the plains of the torrid zone. When advanced in age, the high-priest of Tula left the country of Anahuac, which he had filled with. his miracles, to return to an unknown region, called Tlalpallan. When the monk Bernard de Sahagun arrived in Mexico, the same questions precisely were put to him, as those which were addressed to father Gili two hundred years later in the forests of the Oroonoko ; he was asked, whether he came from the other shore, from the countries to which Quetzalcohuatl had retired."
Humboldt also saw petroglyphs, with symbols engraved and painted on rocks along the Orinoco. He gives their location and guesses that they were done by people who preceeded the current inhabitants: "We have seen above, that the region of sculptured rocks, or of painted stones, extends far beyond the Lower Oroonoko, beyond the country (latitude 7° 5’ to 7° 40’; longitude 68° 50’ to 69° 45’) to which belongs what may be called the local fable of the Tamanacs. We again find these same sculptured rocks between the Cassiquiare and the Atabapo (lat. 2° 5’ to 3° 20’; long. 69° to 70°); and between the sources of the Essequibo and the Rio Branco (lat. 3° 50'; long. 62° 32’). I do uot assert, that these figures prove the knowledge of the use of iron, or that they denote a very advanced degree of culture; but even on the supposition, that, instead of being symbolical, they are the fruits of the idleness of hunting nations, we must still admit an anterior race of men, very different from those who now inhabit the banks of the Oroonoko and the Rupunuri."
The Tamanac People
The Tamanacs were a tribe that belonged to the Cariban linguistic group and lived in the area comprised by the Cuchivero River, which flows into the lower Orinoco in Venezuela. The Jesuit missionaries attempted to group them in the mission of San Luis de Encaramada in 1749 (approx. location map) and Father S. Gilii (mentioned further up by Humboldt) remained there for 18 years until the Jesuits were expelled from the Spanish colonies in America in 1767. He recorded the myth (more on his writings below). The mission passed on to another order, but it declined, and during the independence wars in the 1810s and 1820s they suffered a high death toll which nearly wiped them out.
They had a mythical deluge myth of noachian scale, which left only one man and one woman alive. They survived by climbing to the summit of the Tamanaca mountain. Amalivaca came to their land after crossing the Atlantic Ocean, and civilized them in a Promethean way, he counted with the help of his brother. He is the one who engraved the symbols mentioned by Humboldt, on cliffs and rocks.
Gilli's Account
Filippo Salvadore Gilii (1721-1789) wrote his account (Saggio di storia americana o Sia storia naturale, civile, e sacra de regni, e delle provincie spagnuole di terra-ferma nell'America meridionale, 1780). Below is the text about Amalivaca (See vol. 3, p. 5).
" The Indians know, or rather, calling themselves Gentiles, also knew a tribe on which the inferior tribes depend, and they call them in their language the Amalivacà. The Parians call them the Amarivacà, the Caribs call them the Amarivacà; and the name given to them by the Zavaricotti, the Guaichiri, the Chirichiripi, the Machiritaria, and by many others, whose catalogue we will give elsewhere, is not very different.
The Tamanachi [Tamanacs] give to Amalivacà a brother called Voce, and they say that with him he created the earth. In the formation of the river Orinoco there was a long conflict between the two of them.
...
Amalvacà had a daughter (the story of the Tamanachi continues) who, like many of her peers, loved walking; and her father, to prevent her from doing so, broke her legs.
Amalivaca stayed for a long time with the Tamanachi in the place called Màita. There they show the cave, which is nothing but a steep cliff on the top of which there are some rocks shaped like a cave. When I saw it, it was called the Amalivacà-jeutitpe; that is, the cave where Amalivacà lived. Your drum is not far from that cave is his drum, a large rock, on the road to the Màita, to which they give that name.
Amalivacà after he had been living for many years with the Tamanachi (their stories continue), finally chose a canoe and returned to the other side of the sea, from where he had come. You, for sure, they said to me, must have seen him there.
When leaving (here is some final news) Having already entered the canoe, he turned to the Tamanachi and said in another voice: uopicaccetpe mapkateccì; that is, you will change your skin so much. What he wanted to indicate with those words, the Tamanachi say that our ancestors did not die, but that by perpetually rejuvenating themselves, they would only have changed their skin like crickets, serpents, and other similar animals."
On page 30, Gilii notes that this deity was very human: " the Tamanachì speak of him as of a man (who was with them in Màita, they say, who had to be dressed, that he was white, and similar things not applicable to one who creoles, but to one who was the first to bring them to those places."
The Rock Art
In vol. 2, p. 234 he mentions the petroglyphs: "About eight miles from Ecaramada, there is a rock called Tepu merème, that is, the painted stone. I thought I would see some memorable stone there, and, eager to clarify, I went to see it. But as far as I could see, the paintings they have on the ceiling of the aforementioned rock are nothing but rough outlines, made in ancient times with some kind of stone, and have no appearance of letters. The Indians do not give them any meaning, and only say that they are made by Amalivacà, who they consider their god."
A paper describes the site of Amalivaca Cave (Tarble de Scaramelli, Kay, and Franz Scaramelli. 2021. Cueva de Amalivaca: Tradición y memoria. Boletín Antropológico 39: 35–65) with images of the rock art and details about its location, age, use, and interpretation of the symbols.
In 1810 Humboldt wrote a letter to a French colleague with the symbols that a friar named Juan Ramón Bueno had sent him, copied from rocks in Urbana, very close to the Gilli's Jesuit Mission site. These symbols, pictured below, were incised into hard granite rock, and Humboldt asked his colleague for help, as he wanted to decipher them. See this Paper in Spanish about this script, with Humboldt's letter. Also read his comments with a plate showing the script (French) in his book "Vues des Cordilleres, et monumens des peuples indigenes de l'Amérique", Humboldt, p.61.
Punic letters?
In "Vues des Cordilleres..." Humboldt wrote the following: "One might recognize in these characters some resemblance to the Phoenician alphabet; but I strongly doubt that the good monk, who seemed to take little interest in this supposed inscription, copied it with great care. It is quite remarkable that, of the seven characters, none is repeated more than once: I had them engraved only to focus the attention of scholars who may one day visit the forests of Guiana on such a worthy subject." (p. 61
Humboldt continues: "It is quite remarkable, moreover, that this same wild and deserted region, in which Father Bueno believed he saw letters engraved on the granite, presents a great number of rocks which, at extraordinary heights, are covered with figures of animals, representations of the sun, the moon, and the stars, and other signs that are perhaps hieroglyphic. The natives recount that their ancestors, in the time of the great floods, reached the summit of these mountains by canoe, and that at that time the stones were still in such a soft state that men were able to trace lines on them with their fingers. This tradition suggests a horde whose culture is quite different from that of the people who preceded them: it reveals a complete ignorance of the use of the chisel and any other metal tool."
The Transoceanic Implications of Amalivaca
The deluge myth appears to be universal, it is mentioned by different cultures around the world, and probably reflects the flooding of coastal plains during the period following the end of the last Ice Age when areas like doggerland, the Black Sea, and the Sunda shelf were submerged by the rapid sea-level rise provoked by large-scale ice melt.
The interesting features of the Amalivaca myth are his civilizing activities, the bark or canoe that brought him across the Atlantic, to America, and his return to his place of origin after he finished his work here. He was a human, white, wore clothes, had a brother, and a daughter, and produced rock art.
Amalivaca was a human being.
His transoceanic origin is similar to the myth of the white, bearded, tunic-clad god-like people mentioned in other Amerindian myths: Quetzalcoatl among the Mesoamericans and also Viracocha among the Incas, who was also bearded, white, and wore special clothes, and whose name means "wide" (vira) and "sea" (cocha) and is said to have vanished by crossing the Pacific.
I am not implying that white, bearded Europeans or Egyptians, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, etc. visited America in a civilizing mission, but point out a common myth that is shared by Aztecs, Incas, and the Orinoco jungle people. It must be an ancient one, with very old roots, perhaps dating to the times when America was peopled, contemporary with the post-glacial floods that originated the deluge myths across the Americas.
Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025 by Austin Whittall ©
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