A Straw Man: The Real Meaning behind the Amazon "Astronaut" Suit

This week H2 has been running a promotional spot for a rerun of Ancient Aliens (S03E05) in which Giorgio Tsoukalos rhapsodizes about the way an Amazonian cult outfit (below right) looks so much like an "astronaut suit" (below left) that it must be proof that the aliens visited:

“The appearance of Bep-Kororoti has been preserved to this day, in fact it’s a medicine man wearing a straw suit, and that straw suit looks eerily similar to a modern day astronaut suit.”

I don't see it. There is no oxygen pack, for one thing. Among other things this looks is:

1. A beekeeper.

The Beekeepers by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

2. An old-timey scuba-diver.

Diving suit. Image © 2008 Richard Croft via Wikimedia Commons. Used under Creative Commons 2.0 license.

3. The Venus of Willendorf

Venus of Willendorf. © 2007 Matthias Kabel via Wikimedia Commons. Used under Creative Commons 3.0 license.

Or, you know, anyone who's fat.

This particular straw man (literally, I guess) is the Kayapo tribe's revered and feared shaman Bep Kororot. In The Gold of the Gods (1973), Erich von Daniken made a big (and racist) deal of how the suits worn by the "wild Indians" resembled astronauts' suits even as far back as 1952, "At a time when the clothing and equipment of astronauts was still not familiar to all us Europeans, let along these wild Indians!" (pp.144-146). Von Daniken then quotes the legend of Bep Kororot as told by Joao Americo Peret, who had already expressed sympathy for the ancient astronaut theory before relating the story to von Daniken and therefore had every reason to subtly shade the tale to make it sound as though this were an extraterrestrial being who descended from the sky. This is what Peret said in the 1970s, when talking with von Daniken:

Bep Kororoti walked backwards to the far edge of the Pukato Ti. With his 'kop' he destroyed everything that was near to him. By the time he had reached the very top of the mountain range, trees and bushes had turned to dust. Suddenly there was a tremendous crash that shook the whole region and Bep Kororoti vanished into the air, surrounded by fiery clouds, smoke and thunder. By this earthshaking event the roots of the bushes were torn from the ground and the wild fruits destroyed. Game disappeared so that the tribe began to suffer from hunger. (p. 149)

The funny thing, of course, is that old Von Daniken presented this as though it was his own discovery. But this figure was well known to Claude Levi-Strauss, who reported on him in The Raw and the Cooked (1983), using anthropological reports collected years earlier. In standard anthropological reports, Bep Kororoti is correctly identified not as an ancient astronaut but as a human being, a deceased shaman who exercises spiritual power from beyond the grave. It would be a bit difficult for an alien wearing a spacesuit--one who does not breathe oxygen--to have mated with earth women and produced children, as Bep Kororoti did. Surely even the "wild Indians" would have noticed if one of their number were another species and unable to breathe air.

Most importantly, Bep Kororoti is the protector of bees in Kayapo myth. That's the real reason for the suit. As I mentioned above, it looks like a beekeeper's suit because it is: it represents the beekeeping ancestor spirit.