Cherufe

Also Known As: also Cherrufe, Cherruve, Cheruve, Cherube, Chewurfe; the Mapudungun name is usually glossed as the one that burns things to ash, though the older records give it simply as the word for a meteor
Region/Culture: South America
Mythos: Mapuche Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Elementals
Mythical Attributes: A being of falling fire that crosses the night sky, carries sickness to whichever district it leans toward, and cools on landing into a red stone that can be owned.
Role in Mythos: It is the great luminous omen of the Araucanía, and in its stone form the deadliest thing a chief or a sorcerer could keep in the house.
Relation to Humans: Its passage overhead is read as a forecast of epidemic and death for the settlements beneath it. Once it has fallen it changes register entirely and becomes property, enriching whoever picks it up and killing on command for whoever feeds it.

The first sign is a light in the wrong part of the sky, low and moving, dragging a tail behind it. People stop what they are doing and watch which way it tips, because the valley it leans toward is the valley that will be burying its people.

Tomás Guevara, setting down the myths of the Araucanía in 1908, put it without ornament. The cherrufe is an aerolite, and it brings death and epidemics to the settlements it inclines toward. That is the base of the thing. Everything else grew on top of it.

When it comes down it stops being fire. What is left in the grass is a red stone, cold, and it will never burn again. It makes rich whoever finds it or buys it off the finder. This is the part that falls out of the retellings, and it is the part that mattered most in ordinary life. A cherrufe was not only a portent. It was property.

Its shape depends on where the question is asked. Guevara noticed the ordinary drift of old myths toward human form and recorded the result: along the coast and through the central valleys the cherrufe had acquired a man’s head on the body of a snake, and that was the commonest version. On both sides of the Andes it is something else, a seven-headed monster that vomits fire, turns into other animals, and keeps to the country near the volcanoes. Nobody harmonised the two. They ran alongside each other in different districts.

The anchimallén does similar work and is regularly confused with it. Guevara’s anchimallén is a dwarf of no fixed sex that turns into wandering fire, into a reptile, into a herdsman minding its owner’s stock, and it feeds on the relatives of whoever took it into service. The two overlap at the point where a light is somebody’s servant.

A wealthy man’s cherrufe lived indoors. It sat as a stone, nothing much to look at, and it ate silver. Its owner would break up stirrups and spurs and bridle fittings into scrap and lay the pieces underneath it, and the silver would go down a little at a time, the way food does.

One account, from José M. Lonquitue, begins in the heat. A man had four wives, and in summer they went down at noon to bathe in the lagoon beside the house. One came back from the water agitated and told him to come and look. There was a sheep standing in the lagoon, brown, and when he had pulled off his chamal and got a hand on it, the sheep turned in his grip into a stone shaped like a man. Finding a vision that way is called perimontun. He kept the stone for the rest of his life and called it cherruve cura. It earned its keep. It flew out at night in the form of a comet, arrived wherever it was going with a noise like something collapsing, warned him when war was coming, and told him whether his own journey to that war would go well or badly. On the mornings after, its mouth was bloody. The man died rich.

Ramón Lienan told a shorter one. Namuncurá, son of Calfucurá, over on the Argentine side, had a cherruve, and it was a stone. He sent it wherever he liked. It went to the rival chiefs and it killed them. To the poor it did nothing. It flies like fire, and a shut room will not hold it, since it leaves by whatever gap it chooses.

The volcano version is the one that travelled furthest. In it the cherufe lives in the magma, is built of burning rock, and has to be kept quiet with a girl thrown into the crater, after which it burns her head and pitches the remains out onto the slopes for the neighbours to find in the valleys below. That story fastened onto the Andean dragon form and then hardened, in the Chilean legend collections and later in English, into the whole of what the creature is supposed to be. Guevara’s field texts contain none of it. What they do contain is a mountain that was already occupied, because in the eastern districts the dead were understood to pass into the volcanoes, chiefs and rich men in particular, and a fire-monster collecting tribute is a late arrival in a house with tenants.

Everything the cherrufe does follows from being a falling star that somebody caught. It burns. It flies. It travels in a straight line to a named target and comes back to where it is kept. It announces what is coming, having been up where such things can be seen coming. It spreads sickness by leaning over a place rather than by any stated malice toward it. And it makes its owner wealthy, first through the plain value of the red stone and then through whatever a man can do with a weapon that leaves no witnesses.

Its limits are the limits of a possession. It goes out and it must come back. It is fed or it is not fed, and the feeding costs real silver, so that a household’s tableware disappears slowly into the floor. It answers to an owner, which means it can be stumbled on by accident, bought, sold and lost. It is selective in a way no one could insure against, killing chiefs and ignoring the poor. And once it has landed it is finished as fire, because the red stone in the grass has done its burning and will not do it again. Guevara set these stones beside the conopas of Peru, the small oddly coloured household stones kept as domestic guardians, and the comparison holds. For all the seven heads and the vomited fire, the cherrufe most often ends up as something kept indoors, fed, and consulted.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Cherufe?

The Cherufe is a fire-being of Mapuche belief in southern Chile and Argentina, recorded first of all as a meteor that carries death and epidemics to whichever settlement it leans toward as it crosses the sky. When it lands it becomes a red stone that never burns again and that brings wealth to whoever finds or buys it. In its personified forms it is a serpent with a man’s head, or a seven-headed fire-breathing dragon of the Andes.

What does the Cherufe look like?

The Cherufe has no single form. Along the Chilean coast and through the central valleys it is described as a creature with a man’s head and the body of a serpent, which was the most widespread version recorded in the early twentieth century. On both flanks of the Andes it appears instead as a seven-headed monster that vomits fire, shifts into other animals, and lives near the volcanoes.

Did the Cherufe really demand virgin sacrifices?

The maiden sacrifice belongs to the volcano-dwelling dragon version of the Cherufe, which spread through Chilean legend collections and then into English retellings. Tomás Guevara’s Mapuche field texts of 1908 contain nothing of it. In those accounts the Cherufe is a falling light and a stone kept by chiefs and sorcerers, and the volcanoes are occupied by the dead rather than by a monster taking tribute.

What is a cherufe stone?

A cherufe stone is what the Cherufe becomes after it falls, a red stone that its owner keeps and feeds. Owners fed theirs on scrap silver, breaking up stirrups, spurs and bridle fittings and laying the pieces beneath it, and the silver dwindled over time. The stone flew out at night as a comet, killed enemy chiefs on command, and warned its owner when war was coming.

Where does the Cherufe live?

In the older Mapuche accounts the Cherufe belongs to the night sky and, once fallen, to its owner’s house, where it is kept as a stone. The Andean version of the creature lives in the country around the volcanoes of southern Chile and Argentina, and the later popular tradition places it inside the magma itself.