EDUCATION | MOON MYTHS

The Muysca people of South America used to be considered primitives because they did not have agriculture, religion, or law, but one day an old man named Bochica came and taught them how to tend the fields, to worship the gods, and to maintain order as a nation. However, Bochica had a beautiful, cruel wife who liked to spoil all of his work. Once, she flooded the land and nearly killed all of the Muysca, so her husband drove her from the Earth, making her the Moon. After draining the land, Bochica taught the people the annual calendar and to worship the Sun. However, the people know that Bochica himself was actually the Sun, and that the Moon was his wife Huythaca.
[Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Cultures]

'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, Dedeheiwa 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.'
[DER Documentary, Moonblood: A Yanomamo Creation Myth as Told by Dedeheiwa]