Antü

There is a hawk that lives inside the sun, and it used to be somebody. The Mapuche called it *antü kəchükəchü*, the sun’s peuco, and when it came wheeling down out of the glare they took it for the soul of one of their own dead, back for a look at the fields. An eagle made the same journey and earned its own compound, *antü paiñamko*, the eagle that came from the sun. Félix José de Augusta wrote both into his dictionary in 1916 without much comment, filed between the word for sunstroke and the word for a garden that gets too much light. That is the shape of the thing. The sun is not a story in this tradition. It is a fact you live underneath, and the dead keep coming out of it.

Antü is not a name the way Zeus is a name. It is the ordinary Mapudungun word for the sun, and also for a day, and also for a season, and also for the time of day. A man judging when to start walking looked up and asked *tunté antü*, how high is the sun. A woman spreading washing across a fence said *ad antü*, in the sun. A hungry year was a *weʃá antü*, a bad sun. When the wheat came up stunted the phrase was that the crop had been held back *antü meu*, by the sun, and when the season turned people said the sun had gone away north. The same short word carries the disc, the heat, the calendar and the clock, and it never stops meaning all of them at once.

Whether that made him a god depended a great deal on who was asking. In 1606 the Jesuit Luis de Valdivia printed a set of sermons in the language of Chile for use on the frontier, and the questions he supplied for the confessional are the earliest hard evidence of what people were actually doing with the sun. Have you named the sun in reverence, he instructed his priests to ask, along with the rivers and the hills, and asked them for life? Have you drawn blood from your own body at a drinking feast, naming the pillan? He was not describing a pantheon. He was itemising crimes. But nobody writes a question like that unless somebody is doing it, and what somebody was doing on the Araucanía frontier in the early 1600s was standing out under the sun and asking it to let them live.

Nobody drew his face. There is no old Mapuche image of a solar figure with a body, no crown, no chariot, no ancestor holding a disc, and the closest anyone gets is that hawk, which remains a hawk. What survives instead is the sun’s behaviour, recorded with real care: the burn that gets its own verb, *areŋei antü*, the sun is scorching; the smear of light a half-blind man can still make out across a field when he can no longer make out a person; the way it comes through thin cloud as a bloom with no edge to it. That is a portrait of a kind. It is simply not a portrait of anybody.

Where he came from, the old record mostly declines to say. The fullest telling comes from Armando Marileo in 1994, who described a first great force alone in the Wenu Mapu opening a round hatch in the sky to watch what its creatures were doing below, and a tremendous heat pouring down through that opening, and this being the sun, and the masculine. The mother of the first child opened a second hatch when her husband was not looking, and out of her face came a soft white light, and this was the moon, and the feminine. Two windows in the floor of heaven, punched by two people keeping an eye on their children. Older accounts have no birth for the sun at all. It is there, it always was, and the interesting question is what it does.

What it does is not entirely kind. When María Ester Grebe and her colleagues took down what Mapuche communities said about the shape of the cosmos in the early 1970s, the sun came off badly. Life and death divided between the moon and the sun, and the sun took the worse half. One man put it in the clipped Spanish of the reducciones: the moon is what gave birth to us, but antü is the one who carries us off; the moon left a person like this, and the sun is the opposite party, and when someone dies it is the sun who takes them. The sun is *këtral mapu*, fire country. Therefore it is bad. Or it is bad and good together, since it also rises and gives the clarity and warmth to dry a sowing properly and ripen it properly. In a system where everything ambiguous slides toward the bad, being both at once is already the verdict.

A lonko’s son and a machi once sat down together and drew the whole cosmos out in colour at Grebe’s request. The upper world came out white and blue, the moon blue, the stars white, the cordillera violet, the ground of one’s own community green. The sea came out black. The sun came out red, in the same bracket as the cherrufe, the fire that falls out of the sky, and the Llaima volcano, on the side marked bad, in the west and the north. Grebe was careful to note that this was one testimony from two men. It is also the only picture of him anybody made.

There is a warmer Antü, and he is just as real. The deity most Mapuche now call Ngünechen is not one figure but four at once, old and young, man and woman, and any quarter of him can step forward alone. One quarter is Futa Antü, Father Sun. Another is Cuyen Kushe, the old woman moon. Ana Mariella Bacigalupo followed that arrangement back through the colonial chroniclers and watched it thicken on the way, absorbing Elchen who made people and Elmapun who made the land, picking up omnipotence and omniscience somewhere in the long argument with the missionaries. Father Sun is a face of that composite. He is not a king with a hall of his own.

The king with the hall arrived late, and from outside. In 1999 Alberto Trivero, an Italian-born researcher who first met Mapuche storytelling in Chiloé in 1970, published *Trentrenfilú*, which gathered scattered tellings and rewrote them as one continuous cosmogony on the working assumption that one had originally existed. In that book Antü is the greatest of the Pillán, gold that the flame cannot darken, who chooses the moon Kueyen out of all the star spirits for a wife, falls out with the fiery Peripillán, beats him, and buries him under the Andes, where the volcanoes are still him trying to get out. It is a fine story and it is a modern one. Nearly everything written about Antü in English since comes down from that book, usually at second hand and usually without the date attached.

What the older record grants him is less cinematic and much harder to argue with. He measures the day and the year, and the naming of both belongs to him. He ripens and he dries, and an entire agricultural calendar hangs on how much of him a given field gets. He burns, and sunstroke has its own verb. He is a road the dead travel, out through the glare in the shape of a hawk that circles back over the plough. And he can be spoken to and asked for life, which is not a thing anyone does to weather.

His limits run along the same lines. He does not create; that work belonged to Elchen and Elmapun and passed to Ngünechen, of whom he holds one quarter share. He cannot hold the night, and the whole half of existence that begins with the moon is shut to him. He commands nobody, because the field record gives him no court and no subjects, only worshippers who are asking a favour. And his name will not sit still. It means the sun, and it means late afternoon, and it means summer, and a word that ordinary can be picked up by anyone and pointed at anything, which is more or less the story of the last hundred years.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Antü in Mapuche mythology?

Antü is the sun in Mapuche belief, and the word is also the ordinary Mapudungun term for the sun, a day, a season and the hour of the day. He is honoured as a power that can be addressed and asked for life, and he appears as Futa Antü, Father Sun, one of the four faces of the composite deity Ngünechen.

Is Antü a good god or an evil one?

Mapuche testimony recorded in the early 1970s treats the sun as ambivalent and leans toward the negative. He ripens and dries the crops, which is good, but he is also called fire country and named as the one who carries people off when they die, while the moon is the one who gave them birth.

Is Antü married to the moon goddess Kueyen?

The marriage of Antü and Kueyen comes from *Trentrenfilú*, a 1999 book by Alberto Trivero that deliberately rewrote scattered Mapuche tellings into a single unified cosmogony. Older Mapuche sources pair the sun and the moon as opposites rather than as husband and wife, with Father Sun and the old woman moon standing as separate faces of Ngünechen.

What does Antü look like?

No Mapuche source describes Antü as a figure, and there is no traditional image of him with a body, a face or a crown. The closest thing the record offers is the *antü kəchükəchü*, a hawk said to live inside the sun and to be the soul of a dead relative, along with an eagle called *antü paiñamko* that comes from the same place.

Did the Mapuche actually worship the sun?

Yes. The Jesuit Luis de Valdivia printed confessional questions in 1606 asking whether penitents had named the sun in reverence along with the rivers and hills and asked them for life, which shows the practice was common enough on the Araucanía frontier to need suppressing.

Related Entries

Kueyen, Ngenechen, Pillan, Ngen, Wekufe, Machi, Ngillatun, Cherufe, Trentren-Vilu, Caicai-Vilu, Inti, Shamash, Helios, Amaterasu, Tonatiuh