Moonblood: A Yanomamö Creation Myth as Told by Dedeheiwa

In this myth, the Yanomamö account for the creation of human beings and for their ferocity. The myth is told by the shaman Dedeheiwä. 

Long ago, when people "like us" lived in a village "over there," Moon lived there too, and ate the souls of children. The villagers became very angry, especially because when Moon descended to consume the ashes of children, hanging from the roof in gourds, he crunched and chanted as he gloated over his evil tricks. So the ancestor Suhirina, who was very beautiful and tall, shot the moon with a bamboo-tipped arrow, and Moon's blood spilled all over the earth. Human beings came from this blood: strong and fierce people from the center where the most blood spilled, and weaker people from the Moon's droplets.

You are from true blood, Dedeheiwä tells Chagnon, because there are many of you; my own village is weak, as we are descended from the droplets. It is because of Moon's blood, explains the shaman, that men fight and kill each other.

Moonblood was restored by DER with funding from the National Film Preservation Foundation.

This film is part of the Yanomamö series, a collaborative project undertaken by filmmaker Timothy Asch and anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon between 1968 and 1971 to film the Yanomamö Indians of southern Venezuela and northern Brazil.