The Boy Who Rose to the Sky (South American myth)
"The Boy Who Rose to the Sky" is a South American myth that illustrates the themes of unfulfilled love and the consequences of desires that transcend earthly bounds. The story follows a poor boy tasked with guarding his family's precious potato crop, which is repeatedly stolen by celestial maidens who are, unbeknownst to him, stars. In a moment of desperation, the boy captures one of the maidens, leading to a tragic relationship that ultimately fails when she escapes back to the heavens after their child dies.
The narrative highlights the futility of attempting to forge a lasting bond between beings from different realms, encapsulated in the boy's fruitless quest to reclaim his lost love. His journey involves a condor—a significant creature in Inca culture, symbolizing a connection between earth and sky—who assists him in a year-long flight to a magical lake where he hopes to reunite with the star maiden. However, despite moments of rejuvenation and hope, the boy’s story concludes with a sense of melancholy as he remains trapped between childhood and adulthood, unable to fulfill the responsibilities of life and love. This myth serves as a poignant reflection on the nature of desire, identity, and the challenges of human relationships within the unique cultural context of the Inca civilization.
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Subject Terms
The Boy Who Rose to the Sky (South American myth)
Author: Traditional Inca
Time Period: 1001 CE–1500 CE
Country or Culture: South America
Genre: Myth
PLOT SUMMARY
There lives a poor couple in a modest, remote house with their only child, a son. The family grows excellent potatoes in a field far from their house, and they are the only people to have the prized potato seeds.
Someone begins stealing the potatoes out of the field at night. The parents tell their son to stand guard. The boy tries to stay awake to catch the thieves, but he falls asleep at daybreak. He goes home and tells his parents, and they forgive him.
The next night, he again tries to stay alert, but he blinks at midnight and the thieves again steal the potatoes. When he tells his parents what has happened, they beat and scold him and accuse him of being out with girls instead of standing guard.
Once more, his parents implore the boy to stay alert. As he forces himself to stay awake, his eyelids shake, and he sees a swarm of gorgeous maidens with flowery faces, silver dresses, and golden hair. They rapidly dig up potatoes. Although he does not know it, they are stars from the sky.
The boy falls in love with the star maidens. He manages to catch one, but the rest slip back up to the sky. The maiden is frightened and begs him to let her go. She offers to give back all the potatoes, but the boy is in love and means to make her his wife.
The maiden warns him not to let his parents see her. He tells her not to worry and lies to her saying he had his own house. Eventually, his parents see the maiden and are astounded by her beauty. They care for her but never let her out into the world lest anyone else see her. She becomes pregnant, but the child dies. The star maiden eventually escapes while the boy is away, and she returns to the sky.
When the boy returns home and finds her gone, he is inconsolable. He wanders like a crazy person and eventually encounters a condor that offers to fly him to his bride in exchange for two llamas—one to eat before departing and one to eat in transit. The boy gets them from his parents, the condor eats one, and they fly on their way.
The condor tells the boy to keep his eyes closed and to put a piece of meat in its beak whenever it asks or the condor would drop the boy from its back. As they fly, the llama meat eventually runs out, and the frightened boy cuts off flesh from his own leg to feed the bird.
After a year, the bird and the boy come to a plateau with a lake. They look at their reflections and see they have grown old, but their youth is restored when they bathe in the lake’s water. The condor tells the boy that maidens will come from the temple of the sun and the moon by the side of the lake and that he will only be able to tell his wife from the others because she will be the last to emerge and will brush against him. It tells the youth to grab onto her and not let go.
When the boy catches his bride, she leads him to a house and hides him from her parents, the sun and moon. She gives him some quinoa grain and tells him to make a soup. When he does, the quinoa keeps expanding, and she helps him get rid of it so her parents will not see it. For a year, the boy lives in the house, and the star maiden visits him with food. Eventually, she grows bored and neglects him.
Having grown old in appearance once more, the boy and the condor bathe in the lake. Their youth restored, they take the yearlong flight back to his home. The youth pays two more llamas for the condor’s help. At home, the boy tells his now elderly parents that he cannot remarry. He lives in sadness for the rest of his days.
SIGNIFICANCE
“The Boy Who Rose to the Sky” is considered by some scholars to be similar to the better-known Inca myth of Coniraya and Cahuillaca. Both are stories of thwarted love, where the romantic connection between the male and female protagonists ends in tragedy. In both myths, the male character is eager to marry, but his female counterpart escapes his advances, which prevents the relationship from maturing into a fully developed marriage.
Unlike the story of Coniraya and Cahuaillaca, which is about the love between two gods, “The Boy Who Rose to the Sky” describes a failed attempt at love between different beings from different spheres of existence. The celestial nymphs come down from the heavens at night in order to steal potatoes, which are portrayed in this myth as a very rare and precious commodity. Charged with the task of keeping watch over his family’s valuable crop, the boy witnesses the beautiful thieves, and he manages to hold onto one, preventing her from floating back up to the sky. With the assistance of his parents, who view her as a suitable wife for their son, the boy keeps the nymph as a prisoner in his family’s home. She conceives a child by him, but the child dies. Not long after, she escapes back to the stars. Both of these events point to the futility of an earthly being trying to maintain a relationship with one from the heavenly realm.
In a fit of desperation after being spurned the first time by his would-be heavenly wife, the young man wanders around the earth like a madman. He then meets a condor. For the Inca people, the choice of this bird as the vessel for connection between the earth and heaven would be a natural fit, as condors were considered masters of the upper world who soared far into the heavens. For a price to be paid in flesh, the condor agrees to give the boy a ride to the palace of the sun and the moon.
Ultimately, the boy pays this price both with the llama meat they initially agreed upon and with flesh from his own body. The impossible journey, which takes a year to complete, robs both the bird and the boy of their youthful looks. After bathing in a magical pool, they are rendered young again.
As she emerges from a temple, the boy grabs onto his would-be bride, just as he did in the potato field, and refuses to let her go until she agrees to hide him in a house and live as his wife. Here, she gives him quinoa, which along with potatoes, was a staple starch for the people of medieval Peru. The sharing of quinoa, like potatoes, initiates a kind of de facto marriage. However, the quinoa keeps expanding when the boy tries to make a soup from it, which in turn symbolizes his inability to control and maintain a mature relationship, and the girl becomes worried that her parents, the sun and moon, will find out about her secret marriage and punish her.
In the end, both the boy and his lover refuse to take on the serious responsibility of marriage and ultimately choose to continue to live with their parents. In that way, they both remain children, preserving their youthful existences indefinitely and failing to fulfill the human life cycle, which the Inca held as a sacred duty.
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