In the beginning, humans (bïde) and the gods (Maï) lived together. It was a world without death or labor, but also without fire or cultivated plants. One day, insulted by his human wife, the god Aranãmi decided to leave the earth. Accompanied by his nephew Hehede’a, he took his shaman's rattle, began to sing and smoke, and, through his singing, caused the stone ground they were on to rise into the heights. Thus, the firmament was formed: the sky we see today is the underside of this immense stone slab. Along with Aranãmi and his nephew, dozens of other divine races ascended: the Maï hete, the Awerikã, Marairã, Ñã-Maï, Tiwawi, Awî Peye, and Moropïnã. The Iwã Pïdî Pa ascended even higher, forming a second sky, the "red sky."
The separation of the sky and earth caused a catastrophe. Deprived of its stone foundation, the earth dissolved beneath the waters of a flood: monstrous alligators and piranhas devoured the humans. Only two men and a woman survived by climbing a bacaba palm tree. They are the tema ipi, the "origin of the lineage": the ancestors of present-day humanity. In the upheaval caused by the flood, some Maï sought to escape the monsters by diving into the water and creating the underworld, where they now dwell on islands in a great subterranean river.
Bïde, humans, are called by the Araweté “the abandoned ones,” those left behind by the gods. Everything in our middle world is what was left behind; the greatest animals, the best plants, the most beautiful people went to the heavens—for the Maï are like humans, but taller, stronger, and more imposing. Everything in the sky is made of stone, imperishable and perfect: houses, pots, bows, and axes. For the gods, stone is as malleable as clay is for us. There, no one works because corn plants itself, and agricultural tools operate on their own. The celestial world is one of endless hunts, dances, and feasts of maize beer; its inhabitants are always splendidly adorned with jenipapo paint, decorated with feathers of cotingas and macaws, and perfumed with resin from the tree i d;iri’i (Trattinickia rhoifolia).
But above all, the Maï are immune to disease and death: they took with them the secret of eternal youth. The gods' exile created the condition of all things terrestrial: submission to time, which is to say aging and death. Yet, while we share this mortal condition with other earthly beings, we are distinguished by having a future. Humans are "those who will go," who will reunite with the Maï in the sky after death. The division between the sky and earth is not insurmountable: the gods speak with humans, and one day, humans will be worthy of the gods.
