One of the most long-lived and successful social and cultural systems in South America is that of the Warao Indians of the Venezuelan Orinoco Delta. In Mystic Endowment Johannes Wilbert details the Warao's ecology of mind as well as their understanding of the surrounding world. Throughout centuries of occupancy in the Orinoco Delta, the Warao have successfully adapted themselves to this hostile econiche, converting a seemingly chaotic refuge area into a homeland for successive generations. They accomplished this conversion ...
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One of the most long-lived and successful social and cultural systems in South America is that of the Warao Indians of the Venezuelan Orinoco Delta. In Mystic Endowment Johannes Wilbert details the Warao's ecology of mind as well as their understanding of the surrounding world. Throughout centuries of occupancy in the Orinoco Delta, the Warao have successfully adapted themselves to this hostile econiche, converting a seemingly chaotic refuge area into a homeland for successive generations. They accomplished this conversion by familiarizing themselves with the region's microenvironments and natural resources and then encoding this vital information in their mythology. The resulting corpus of lore reveals how the Warao have endowed their habitat with profound existential meaning. The transmission of this mystic endowment ensured the Indians' physical and spiritual survival. In the ten essays comprising Mystic Endowment, Johannes Wilbert illumines revealing particulars of Warao religious ethnology. He guides the reader through often bizarre and chaotic imagery to an appreciation of the cosmic order established by the myth-making mind of this aboriginal society. The cosmology and cosmogony of the Warao describe the different places of destiny of the human soul; the various artifactual and musical worlds; the houses that situate them in the religious universe; and the interaction between heaven and earth. Shamanic lore is particularly well developed in Warao culture, and Wilbert stresses the crucial role shamanistic ideology plays in the preservation of the community's social and psychic equilibrium.
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