Paraguay

Paraguay is among the most Catholic countries in the Americas by identification, and the character of that Catholicism was set by an experiment that lasted a century and a half. Between 1609 and their expulsion in 1767, the Jesuits built some thirty mission towns, the reductions, among the Guarani. They were planned settlements with a church, workshops, schools and communal fields, they operated in the Guarani language rather than in Spanish, and they produced Baroque music, sculpture and printing to a standard that startles visitors to the surviving ruins at Trinidad and Jesus de Tavarangue, now UNESCO sites.

What the reductions were is argued about and always has been. One reading treats them as a refuge: they were fortified against the bandeirante slave raiders from Sao Paulo, and Guarani militias armed and trained in the missions defeated a raiding force in open battle. The other treats them as a total institution: daily life was regulated hour by hour, movement was controlled, and the whole arrangement depended on the authority of the priests. Both readings can be supported from the record, and the expulsion of the Jesuits by the Spanish crown ended the question by ending the missions, after which most of the population dispersed or was absorbed into ordinary colonial labour.

Guarani survived as a national language spoken by most of the population, which is unique in the Americas for a settler majority country.

The pilgrimage to the Virgin of Caacupe each 8 December is the largest annual gathering in the country, with pilgrims walking from Asuncion and beyond.

Leon Cadogan was a Paraguayan of Australian parentage, self taught, who worked for years among Mbya Guarani communities and was eventually entrusted with material that had not previously been given to outsiders. His publications from the middle of the twentieth century, above all the collection of sacred texts he called Ayvu Rapyta, are among the most closely documented indigenous cosmologies in South America, and they were recorded in Guarani with his translations alongside.

The central idea is that speech and soul are the same thing. Ayvu means word or language, and the ayvu porã tenonde, the first fine word, is the beginning of creation: the creator Namandu unfolds himself, and the world comes from the word he founds. A person's soul arrives as a word soul, sent from the dwelling of the gods, and naming a child is therefore not labelling but discovering, since the ritual specialist's task is to learn which word has come and say it. Ordinary speech and sung prayer are on a continuum with that.

Alongside this sits the yvy marane y, the land without evil, a place reachable in some accounts by migration and in others by perfection of practice, and the historical Guarani migrations toward the coast in search of it are documented from the colonial period onward.

Two cautions belong here. Cadogan worked with particular communities, and what he recorded is Mbya, not a pan Guarani orthodoxy. And the texts were given to him in confidence, in a relationship built over years; some Mbya today have questioned how far material of that kind should circulate at all. The atlas records that the corpus exists and what it concerns, rather than reproducing the prayers.