Bachué

Also Known As: also Furachogua, from Muysccubun *fura*, “woman,” and *chogua*, “a good thing,” so “the good woman”
Region/Culture: South America
Mythos: Colombian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: She is the source of human population itself, bearing four to six children at every birth until the Muisca highlands were full.
Role in Mythos: She is the first mother of the Muisca, who walked out of a mountain lake, peopled the world, gave the people their laws, and went back into the water as a serpent.
Relation to Humans: Every Muisca traced descent from her body, which made her less a distant deity than an ancestor with a name and a lake. She left them rules for living peaceably with one another and for honouring the gods, and the record insists those rules were not few.

At roughly three thousand six hundred metres, the water in the Iguaque lagoon is cold enough to numb a hand inside a minute, and the frailejones standing around it in the fog look like a crowd that has been waiting a very long time. This is where the Muisca said people came from. Not from clay, not from a rib, not from the carved-up body of a murdered giant. From a glacial lake in the Boyacá páramo, above the city the Spanish would rename Tunja, where a woman climbed out of the water one morning holding a three-year-old boy by the hand.

The oldest surviving account of her belongs to a Franciscan. Fray Pedro Simón, born in Castile in 1574, spent fourteen years in the New Kingdom of Granada collecting what he could of what the people there had believed, and set it down in his *Noticias historiales de las conquistas de Tierra Firme*, written in the 1620s. He gives her two names. Bachué is the one that stuck. The other is Furachogua, which he unpacks for his readers: *fura* is the word for woman, *chogua* is a good thing, and she got the name from the good she did. Simón also tells us where the lake sits, about four leagues from Tunja, beside a town the Muisca called Iguaque.

She and the boy came down off the sierras together and built a house in that town, and they lived in it until he was old enough to marry. She married the child she had brought out of the water. The chronicle does not linger over this and neither did the people who told it; the point was what came next, which was children, in quantities that read like a census rather than a family. Four to six at every birth, Simón says. Some retellings raise it to five or six. Either way the arithmetic runs away with itself quickly, and the couple spent the working years of their lives walking, leaving sons and daughters in one valley after another until the highlands were full of them.

Picture her in the doorway of that first house at Iguaque in the thin cold of a páramo afternoon, wind coming down off the ridge, a child on her hip and several more underfoot, saying the same things again for the fourth time that week. What she was saying, according to the record, was law. She taught them how to live at peace with one another and with the nations around them, how to worship, and how to conduct themselves; and Simón, who had no reason to flatter her, notes that the precepts she left behind were numerous.

Then she got old, and so did her husband, and they went back.

They returned to Iguaque and called a great many people to walk with them up to the lagoon. On the shore she made a speech. Live in peace. Look after one another. Keep the laws I gave you, particularly the ones about the gods. The parting was noisy on both sides, with weeping and shouting, and then the two of them changed into serpents and went down into the water, and the chronicle is flat about what happened afterwards: they did not appear again.

That is the whole of the attested story. How it reaches us matters as much as what it says. No Muisca wrote it. It survives because Spanish friars were curious enough to ask, in a period when asking was actively discouraged. A royal decree of 1577 ordered that nobody was to write about indigenous beliefs or ways of living in any language, and the fifth book of Pedro Aguado and Antonio de Medrano’s chronicle, which covered exactly that ground for the Muisca, was suppressed under it. The historian Juan Friede later found that Simón had copied substantial portions of the censored material into his own work, which is the reason Bachué has any documented shape at all. Simón’s frame around her is not sympathetic. He describes the whole religious world she belonged to as blindness and darkness, the work of the devil, and he writes her down anyway. Some of the most important things we know about the Muisca survive because a man who despised their gods was thorough.

What she does, she does through her body and her authority: she generates, and she legislates. The power is not thrown from a rainbow the way Bochica’s golden staff was, and there is no shattering of mountains. It is slower than that and harder to undo. Every Muisca alive at the conquest could, in principle, count backwards to her. The lake is the second half of the same power, because a place a god has entered stays entered; the Muisca made offerings at streams, waterfalls, lakes and hilltops rather than inside stone temples, and Iguaque was sacred for the plain reason that she went into it.

Her limits are the ones the story gives her. She ages. She hands over her rules and leaves, and unlike Bochica she does not come back to fix anything, so when the waters rose over the savannah it was not Bachué who dealt with it. She has no weapon and no monster to fight. And the serpent she becomes at the end is a departure rather than a promotion, a door closing on the far side of the water. The lake is still there. It sits inside the Santuario de Fauna y Flora Iguaque now, one of eight glacial lagoons in a protected block of páramo and high Andean forest between Villa de Leyva, Arcabuco and Chíquiza, and people still climb the trail to look at it.

She had one more career after that. In 1925 a young Colombian sculptor named Rómulo Rozo, working in Paris, made a heavy-lidded, broad-shouldered figure he called *Bachué, diosa generatriz de los chibchas*, later cut in black granite at over three hundred kilos. The image travelled home through the newspapers and gave its name to a loose movement of artists and writers, Los Bachués, formed around 1930, who wanted a Colombian art built out of indigenous rather than imported material. A goddess whose entire surviving biography had been written down by a friar who thought she was a demon spent the twentieth century as a national symbol.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Bachué in Muisca mythology?

Bachué is the mother of humanity in the religion of the Muisca people of the Colombian highlands. She emerged from Lake Iguaque in Boyacá carrying a three-year-old boy, later married him, and bore the children who populated the Muisca world. She is also called Furachogua, meaning “the good woman.”

Where did Bachué come from?

Bachué came out of the water of the Iguaque lagoon, a glacial lake in the Eastern Cordillera about four leagues from the city of Tunja. No source describes anything before that moment. The lake itself became sacred to the Muisca because she emerged from it and later returned to it.

What happened to Bachué at the end of her story?

Bachué and her husband grew old, returned to Iguaque, and gathered a crowd at the lagoon, where she gave a farewell speech urging the people to live in peace and keep the laws she had given them. Both of them then turned into serpents and went into the water. The chronicle states that they never appeared again.

Who wrote down the myth of Bachué?

The oldest surviving account comes from the Franciscan friar Pedro Simón in his *Noticias historiales de las conquistas de Tierra Firme*, written in the 1620s. Simón had lived fourteen years in the New Kingdom of Granada and copied material from an earlier chronicle by Pedro Aguado and Antonio de Medrano whose relevant volume had been suppressed by royal order in 1577.

How is Bachué related to Bochica and Chiminigagua?

All three belong to the same Muisca religious world, but they do different work. Chiminigagua is the source of light and the origin of creation, Bochica is the culture hero who saved the Muisca from a flood, and Bachué is the ancestor from whom the people themselves physically descend.