This seventeenth century description is on the whole true to the results obtained by later observers of the rites and beliefs of the Amazonian Indians. To be sure, a certain amount of interpretation is desirable: the _idolos_ of Acuña are hardly idols in the classical sense; rather they are in the nature of charms, fetishes, ritual paraphernalia, trophies,--all that goes under the name "medicine," as applied to Indian custom. And it is true, too, that in so vast a territory, and among peoples who, although all savages, differ widely in habit of life, there are indefinite variations both in custom and mental attitude. Some tribes are but hunters, fishers, and root-gatherers; others practice agriculture also. Some are clothed; many are naked. Some practice cannibalism; others abhor the eaters of human flesh. Any student of the miscellaneous observations on the beliefs of the South American wild tribes, noted down by missionaries, officials, naturalists, adventurers, professional ethnologists, will at first surely feel himself lost in a chaos of contradiction. Nevertheless, granted a decent detachment and cool perspective, eventually he will be led to the opinion that these contradictions are not all due to the Indian; the prepossessions and understandings of the observers is no small factor; and even where the variation is aboriginal, it is likely to be in the local colour rather than in the underlying fact. In this broad sense Acuña's free characterization hits the essential features of Indian belief, in the tropical forests.
More than one later writer is in accord with the implicit emphasis which the Padre de Acuña places upon the importance on the food-giving animals and plants in Indian lore and rite. On these food sources in many parts of South America the abundant fish and other fluvial life is primary. Hugo Kunike has indeed, argued that the fish is the great symbol of fertility among the wild forest tribes, supporting the contention with analysis of the dances and songs, fishing customs, ornamentation-motives, and myths of these tribes.[180] Certainly he has shown that the fish plays an outstanding rôle in the imaginative as well as in the economic life of the Indian, appearing, in one group of myths, even as a culture hero and the giver of tobacco. Even more than the fish, the turtle ("the beef of the Amazon"), which is a symbol of generation in many parts of America, appears in Amazonian myth, where in versions of the Hare and the Tortoise (here the Deer replaces the Hare), of the contest of the Giant and the Whale pulling contrari-wise, and in similar fables the turtle appears as the Trickster. So, also, the frog, which appears in magical and cosmogonical _rôles_,--as in the Canopus myth narrated by Teschauer, where a man married a frog, and, becoming angered, cut off her leg and cast it into the river, where the leg became the fish _surubim_ (_Pimelodes tigrinus_), while the body rose to heaven to appear in the constellation. The like tale is told by other tribes with respect to Serpens and to the Southern Cross.