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This introductory chapter first sets out the book's purpose, which is to present a theoretical and experiential translation of Napo Runa mythology and music. It seeks to translate myths and songs so that readers can get a better appreciation for the beauty and complexity of Amazonian Quichua poetic expressions. The chapter then turns to a discussion of storytelling, defined as the complex whole of telling stories, artful descriptions of and about life that involve past, present, and future happenings, happenings that also including mythological transformations and experiences. The remainder of the chapter covers the theoretical foundations of the present analysis as well as the translation methodology used. It concludes with an overview of the subsequent chapters.

This chapter shares the Iluku story and the origin of the sun story, two beginning-times transformations of celestial relations in Upper Amazonian Quichua mythology. In the first story, Iluku, the mother of the twins or culture heroes, is the analogical mother of the Amazonian Quichua community. The sun, by contrast, is a one-eyed anaconda, a being whose presence is analogic of masculine potency and human procreation. The chapter argues that the significance behind these stories is axis mundi relationality and a human condition defined by poetic relations with celestial, ecological, and spirit others. The relatedness among birds, people, rocks, rivers, the wind, the landscape, and various other presences provides people with a deep emotional and social attachment to the ecological world around them. The poetics of these narratives and songs derive from experience of this rich landscape. The stories, as shown through text as well as sound, emphasize the dependence of people on spirit and cosmological others in the larger complexity of life and its varied transformations.

This chapter employs the verse analysis method developed by Dell Hymes to analyze an Amazonian Quichua myth-narrative, “The Twins and the Jaguars,” from the province of Napo. The narrative's theme, “becoming a jaguar,” is expressed through a rhetorical logic of onset, ongoing, and outcome that unfolds as a structural transformation relation between humans and mythical jaguars. This structural transformation relation is mediated by a third element, the twins, who not only lend movement to structure but also advance the development of drama by obviating previous relations as a dynamic synecdoche. The chapter demonstrates the major contours of performative complexity involved in Amazonian Quichua narration of traditional mythical knowledge and the importance of the jaguar as an active and dominant symbolic “sign” of “becoming” in Napo Runa cosmology and culture. It shows that narrative performance emerges as an important artistic, cultural, and religious tool for experiencing the “transcendence” of everyday human form.