South American mythology is a vast field whose purview extends linguistically and archaeologically beyond the continent proper to include the oral traditions of Panama and eastern Costa Rica as well as those of the autochthonous inhabitants of the West Indies. This article will consider myths from the point of view of religious studies and will emphasize the cosmological patterns and sacred symbolism in narratives from nonliterate South American societies of both ancient and modern times.

Since the early sixteenth century more than one thousand languages, representing a variety of linguistic stocks and many unrelated tongues, have been listed for this area—a fact that suggests that South America was populated over a great number of centuries by successive migratory groups that trekked down from Siberia, North America, and Central America. One classification of South American languages attempts to reduce hundreds of mutually unintelligible tongues to only...