Brazil

The Tupi-Guarani case inverts the usual arrangement. The end is not something that arrives; it is somewhere people go. Yvy marã e'ỹ, the land without evil, is a real place in this scheme, reachable by travel, where the earth does not perish, nobody ages, and the crops grow without labour. Prophets, the karaí, gathered followings and led them toward it, usually eastward to the coast and sometimes into the sea itself.

The migrations are documented from first contact onward. André Thevet in the 1550s described Tupinambá prophets moving whole villages; Curt Nimuendajú, working among the Apapocúva Guaraní in the early twentieth century, recorded both the narratives of world-destruction and the living expectation that the present earth would be consumed while the faithful reached the land beyond. His account remains the primary source, and it shows the belief operating rather than remembered.

Hélène Clastres read the prophetism as a critique from inside: a repeated refusal of the settled, hierarchical, accumulating village in favour of departure, with the karaí offering an exit rather than a reform. That gives the tradition a political edge comparable to the Korean or Xhosa cases, but with a different action attached, since the response is migration rather than confrontation. The destination is described in The Land Without Evil and the tradition in Tupi-Guarani Eschatology (Land Without Evil), while Trentren and Caicai: the Mapuche Flood supplies the southern cataclysm against which this hopeful shape stands out. Almost every other tradition here waits. This one packs.