Chía

At 2,600 metres the night air on the Bogotá savanna is thin and cold enough to sting, and the moon comes up over the eastern ridge with a hard edge on it. It lights the reed beds along the river and the flat fields beyond them. The people who farmed that plain before the Spanish came had one word for the thing in the sky and for the stretch of time it measured out. The word was chie. It meant moon, and it meant month.

Chía was the Moon of the Muisca, the people of the high plateau around what are now Bogotá and Tunja. She was half of a pair. The other half was Sué, the Sun, and the two were husband and wife. The poet and priest Juan de Castellanos, writing in the late sixteenth century, recorded that the Muisca thought of Sun and Moon as a married couple and as parents of the people. Later accounts add that the two spend most of their marriage apart, following each other across the sky, and come together only at the dark of the moon and during eclipses. On those nights the plain goes black, and husband and wife are at last in the same place.

Where she came from is told briefly. In the Muisca creation account the first being, Chiminigagua, held all the light there was shut inside himself. He let it out, sent great black birds to carry it across the world on their breath, and then made the Sun and the Moon. Chía is one of the first things in creation. Nothing is said about a childhood.

Nobody wrote down what she looked like, apart from the obvious. She is the moon. There are no descriptions of a face or a costume, and the Spanish friars who recorded Muisca religion were more interested in stamping it out than in asking. What they did note was where she was worshipped.

Her town was Chía, on the bends of the Bogotá and Frío rivers below the hill called Tíquiza. The chroniclers called it the city of the moon. A temple stood there in her honour, and writers on the Muisca have long suspected it served as a place to watch the sky as well as to pray to it. Priests kept it, and offerings of gold and pottery were left there. It did not survive the conquest of 1537 and the years after. The town did, and it still has her name.

Chía the town mattered for a second reason. Among the southern Muisca, a ruler was followed not by his son but by his sister’s son, and the nephew waiting to become zipa governed Chía while he waited. Tisquesusa, the zipa who faced the Spanish, had been lord of Chía before he inherited. So the Moon was the patron of the heir, and of the ruling house of the south, in the way the Sun and its great temple at Sogamoso belonged to the north. Politics on the plateau had a sky to match.

One story gives her more to do than rise and set, and it comes with a complication. The Muisca told of Bochica, a bearded old man who walked in from the east and taught the people to spin, weave and live decently. With him, or after him, came a woman of great beauty who taught the opposite: drinking, dancing and pleasing oneself. Most chroniclers call her Huitaca. Some, including the version Alexander von Humboldt published in the early nineteenth century from the older Spanish writers, say she was also called Chía, and that she was Bochica’s own wife. In that telling she used her arts to make the river Funza rise until the whole savanna was a lake and the people were clinging to the hilltops. Bochica came back, drove her from the earth, and set her in the sky as the moon. Then he struck the rock at Tequendama with his staff, the wall of the plateau split, and the water went roaring down into the gorge, where it still falls.

Other tellings keep the two women apart. In those, Huitaca is turned into an owl, the flood is the work of an angry god named Chibchacum, and Chía is simply the Moon who was there from the start. The stories disagree, and nobody at the time sorted them out. It is fair to say that the Moon as wife of the Sun is the firmer tradition, and the Moon as a punished troublemaker is one branch of the Huitaca story.

Either way her powers are the moon’s. She gives light at night. She measures time, since the Muisca month was her cycle. Later writers link her to the fertility of the fields and of people, which fits a farming plateau that planted by her phases. And in the flood story, under her other name, she can raise a river with a word.

Her limits are the moon’s too. She keeps to a path she did not choose and cannot leave. She sees her husband only in passing. In the telling where she is Bochica’s wife, the sky is not her throne but her sentence, and she lights the night because that is the only time she is allowed out. For a goddess with a town, a temple and a royal heir to her name, she has very little say in where she goes.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Chía in Muisca mythology?

Chía is the Moon goddess of the Muisca people of the Colombian highlands. She is the wife of Sué, the Sun god, and one of the first things made by the creator Chiminigagua. Her name comes from chie, the Chibcha word for both moon and month.

Where was Chía worshipped?

Chía was worshipped at a temple in the town of Chía, north of Bogotá, near the hill of Tíquiza. The chroniclers called the town the city of the moon. The temple was lost after the Spanish conquest, but the town still carries the goddess’s name.

Are Chía and Huitaca the same goddess?

The sources disagree. Some tellings say Huitaca was also called Chía and was the wife of Bochica, who punished her by turning her into the moon. Other tellings keep them separate, with Huitaca turned into an owl and Chía the Moon from the beginning of the world.

What is the link between Chía and the Muisca rulers?

The town of Chía was governed by the heir of the zipa, the ruler of the southern Muisca. A zipa was succeeded by his sister’s son, and that nephew ruled Chía until his turn came. Tisquesusa was lord of Chía before he became zipa.

How is Chía connected to the Tequendama Falls?

In one telling, Chía, also called Huitaca, flooded the Bogotá savanna by making the river Funza rise. Bochica drove her from the earth and made her the moon, then split the rock at Tequendama with his staff to drain the water. Another telling blames the flood on the god Chibchacum instead.

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Bochica, Chiminigagua, Bachué, Lake Guatavita, El Dorado, Mama Quilla, Coyolxauhqui, Ix Chel, Selene