Chaife

Also Known As: also Chaifi, the spelling used in the older printed sources; occasionally Chaifé
Region/Culture: Oceania
Mythos: Chamorro Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He commands wind, wave and fire, and he manufactures souls out of flame in a forge inside a volcanic mountain.
Role in Mythos: He is the god of the CHamoru underworld and the accidental origin of the first person on Guam, since the soul that escaped his forge became that person.
Relation to Humans: The souls he makes are kept as slaves and tortured, and the ethnographic record adds that people who died violent deaths were sent down to him to be cooked in a cauldron he never stopped stirring. Living people meet him only as weather, because the typhoons and the waves that come up out of a calm day are his temper about a soul he could not catch.

The mountain still has the name. Sasalåguan stands in the southern hills of Guam near Malesso’, green and unremarkable from the highway, and in the old accounts it was the roof over a forge that never went cold. Somebody worked down there. He drew souls out of the fire the way a smith draws nails, one after another, and he kept every one he made.

His name was Chaife, and the three things he held were wind, water and fire. That combination is worth pausing on, because it is the whole weather of an island in the western Pacific: the wave that comes over the reef, the wind that flattens the breadfruit trees, and the heat underneath the ground. He was the underworld in the way an island understands an underworld, not as a basement full of shades but as the machinery of a place that can kill you from three directions at once.

The souls he forged were not company. They were labour. He put them to work, he tormented them, and when Laura Thompson set down the old CHamoru beliefs about death for the Bishop Museum in 1945 she recorded the harder half of the arrangement: those who died naturally went down to an underworld of bananas, coconuts and sugar cane, while those who died a violent death went to Sasalåguan, where Chaifi cooked them in a cauldron that he stirred continually. That is the older, thinner, colder version of him, and it sits underneath the story everyone knows.

The story everyone knows begins with a mistake. He was working too fast and let the fire run too hot, and the forge blew. Sparks and ash and broken rock came up out of the mountain, and in the confusion one soul went up with them and got out. It fell into a bay in the south of the island, near where Humåtak stands now, and the instant it touched salt water it hardened into stone. Then it sat there for a long time. Wind and rain worked at it, the way wind and rain work at any rock on that coast, until the stone softened and a man stepped out of it, the first CHamoru.

He liked being alive. He also got bored, so he took red clay, wet it, and shaped men and women out of it with his hands, and he warmed them in the sun until the heat gave them souls. He called them the children of the earth. It is a small, domestic sort of creation story, a man crouched on a beach with mud drying on his knuckles, and it produces the entire population of the world.

Down in the mountain, Chaife got the fire back under control and did his inventory. One short. What follows is the best-known sequence in CHamoru tradition, and it moves like a chase should. He found a child on the sand and decided it was his property, so he sent in a wave to drown it, and the child turned into a fish and swam. He boiled the lagoon dry, and the fish turned into a hilitai, a monitor lizard, and went into the trees. He set the jungle alight, and out of the smoke the lizard came up as a bird. He turned his temper into a typhoon and threw the bird against a cliff hard enough to break its wing, and the bird stood up as a child again and told him the truth: he could use wind, waves, fire and everything else he had, and it would not work, because this soul came from the sun.

Chaife’s answer is the answer of every owner who has just been contradicted. You came out of my mountain, he said. I made you. You belong to me. The child told him he had the wrong one, that the escaped soul was at Fouha Bay making more souls out of sunlight, and that this was why nothing Chaife had was any use. He went away humiliated and kept hunting. He never gets it back. The soul had already turned itself into rock again, and the rock is still there, near Humåtak, at the place where the CHamoru creation is anchored.

That anchoring is not an accident, because Fouha Bay already belonged to an older account. In the story of Puntan and Fu’uña, brother and sister, Puntan gives up his body to make the world and Fu’uña throws herself down onto it and becomes the rock pillar in that same bay. Some tellings knit the two together and make Chaifi a sibling of theirs, the third child, the one who took the underworld. In that version the man’s soft body and quick mind are the gift of Puntan’s tears, and the typhoons come from Chaife’s rage at a soul he cannot destroy, and the man turns himself into stone at a cliff edge specifically to shield his children from that rage. Father Sanvitores, who arrived in 1668 and did not survive the decade, noted that the CHamoru venerated that rock, and thought it was because they believed they had come out of it.

There is a problem with him, and the honest thing is to say it out loud. Guam historians have pointed out that murder, hell and blacksmithing all look like Spanish imports rather than ancient CHamoru furniture, and that the word Sasalåguan now simply means hell in the modern language. Aniti, which once meant nothing more loaded than spirit, was pushed by three centuries of mission preaching into meaning devil. A god who runs a forge and boils sinners in a pot fits a seventeenth-century Catholic imagination suspiciously well. Against that, there is one stubborn detail: the CHamoru word for iron, lulok, is not borrowed from Spanish, which suggests the islands knew what iron was before anyone sailed in to tell them. The tale as we have it in print goes back to Georg Fritz, the German district administrator on Saipan, who published it in 1906, and modern scholarship treats its authenticity as an open question rather than a settled one. What came afterwards, the Van Peenen collection, the Guam schoolbooks, the Legends of Guam anthologies, all runs downstream of that.

What he can do is simple and enormous: he makes souls, and he can reach anyone anywhere on the island through weather. What he cannot do is hold on to anything the sun has touched. Every weapon he has is his own element turned up louder, and the story is built so that each one fails in turn against a thing that keeps changing shape. He is also, plainly, not very bright. He hunts the wrong target for the length of an entire chase, believes a child’s shape is the child’s limit, and is beaten in the end by an argument rather than a blow. Islanders in the Marianas told a story about the fish that was eating Guam in half, and dated its appetite from the time of Chaifi until the Virgin Mary came and stopped it. Even in his own tradition he marks the era before somebody stronger showed up.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Chaife in CHamoru mythology?

Chaife is the god of the underworld in CHamoru tradition on Guam. He is described as a blacksmith who forged souls out of fire inside the volcanic mountain Sasalåguan and kept them as slaves, and he controlled wind, water and fire.

How was the first CHamoru created according to the Chaife legend?

An explosion in Chaife’s forge let one soul escape through the mountain. It fell into a bay near Humåtak in southern Guam, turned to stone when it touched the sea, and was weathered soft by wind and water until it became a man, the first CHamoru, who then made the first people out of red clay warmed in the sun.

What happened when Chaife chased the escaped soul?

Chaife mistook a child on the beach for his lost soul and attacked it four times. A wave met a fish, a boiled-dry lagoon met a monitor lizard, a burning jungle met a bird, and a typhoon met a child again, and each time the transformation defeated him. He withdrew when the child told him the real escaped soul was at Fouha Bay.

Is Sasalåguan a real place?

Yes. Mount Sasalåguan is an actual mountain in southern Guam, near the village of Malesso’. The name is also the CHamoru word for hell, and the ethnographic record says the souls of people who died violent deaths went there, where Chaifi cooked them in a cauldron he stirred continually.

Is Chaife an ancient CHamoru god or a colonial invention?

The question is genuinely open. Historians of Guam have argued that hell, murder and blacksmithing were Spanish introductions rather than pre-contact CHamoru concepts, and the tale reaches print only through Georg Fritz in 1906. The counter-argument is that the CHamoru word for iron, lulok, is not a Spanish loan, which implies the islands knew metal before contact.