Chibchacúm

Also Known As: also Chibchacum, Chibchachum, Chichebachun; usually read as “staff of the Chibcha people” in the Muisca language
Region/Culture: South America
Mythos: Colombian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: Chibchacúm commands rain, thunder and the rivers of the Bogotá highlands, and since his punishment he carries the whole earth on his shoulders.
Role in Mythos: He is the patron god of the Bogotá savanna who drowned his own people in a flood, was overruled by Bochica, and became the cause of earthquakes.
Relation to Humans: Merchants, goldsmiths and farmers of the Muisca looked to him as their protector and made him offerings of gold. When the ground shakes in the highlands, the old explanation is that he is shifting his load from one shoulder to the other.

The ground in Bogotá moves from time to time. Cups rattle on their shelves, a low sound comes up through the floor, and for a few seconds the city on its high plain remembers what it is standing on. The people who farmed that plain before the Spanish came had an explanation for those seconds, and it involved a tired god changing shoulders.

His name was Chibchacúm, and before he carried anything he was a figure of some standing. The Muisca of the southern highlands, the people whose ruler sat at Bacatá, counted him as their own particular god. The great sun temple lay to the north at Sogamoso, and the creator Chiminigagua belonged to everyone, but Chibchacúm belonged to the savanna. He looked after its traders, who walked salt and cotton blankets and emeralds between the market towns. He looked after its goldsmiths and the people who worked its fields. The rain was his to send and the thunder that came with it, and the thin cold streams that run down from the eastern hills answered to him.

On any ordinary evening in the rainy months the arrangement must have looked sound. Cloud builds over the ridge, the light turns the colour of slate, the first heavy drops hit the maize leaves, and a farmer who has kept on the right side of his god watches his ditches fill. Gold went to Chibchacúm in thanks, small pieces of it, left at the proper places.

Then the people of the savanna offended him. The record is not precise about how. They spoke against him, or neglected him, or simply behaved badly in ways he took personally; a later telling adds that their devotion to the teacher-god Bochica had begun to grate. Whatever the cause, Chibchacúm decided on a punishment that only a god of water could deliver. He took two rivers, the Sopó and the Tibitó, and turned their full weight onto the plain.

The savanna of Bogotá is a bowl. It sits more than two and a half thousand metres up, ringed by mountains, and in those days the story gives it no way out. The water came down and stayed. Fields went under, then houses. The people climbed to the hilltops with what they could carry and watched a brown lake spread where their towns had been, and when the food began to run short they fasted, made offerings and called on Bochica.

He came at dusk, standing on a rainbow over the town of Soacha, with a staff of gold in his hand. The crowd on the hills heard him say that he had listened and would open the plain. Then he threw the staff at the wall of rock on the south-western rim. The rock split. The lake found the gap and went through it with a roar, down a drop of more than a hundred and fifty metres into the warm country below, and it has been falling there ever since. The Tequendama Falls are the scar that the staff left. The plain drained, the soil it left behind was rich, and the people came down off the hills.

Bochica then dealt with the god who had caused it. Until that day the earth had rested on great posts of guayacán, a wood so hard and heavy that it sinks in water. Bochica took the posts away and set the world on Chibchacúm’s shoulders instead. That was the sentence, and it has no end date.

It is an odd fall for a patron of commerce. One day he is receiving gold from grateful merchants and the next he is furniture. He bears the weight, because he has no choice, but he gets tired, and when he does he heaves the load across from one shoulder to the other. That is an earthquake. In the highlands, the story goes, people once answered a tremor by calling out to him to hold steady.

Nothing describes what he looked like. The storytellers gave Bochica a long beard, a staff and a mantle, and they gave the moon goddess a full and scandalous biography, but Chibchacúm comes down as a temper and a pair of shoulders. Nor does any account say where he came from. He has no parents, no birth and no wife in the surviving material. He is simply there when the story opens, already the god of the place.

Almost all of this reaches the present through one channel. Fray Pedro Simón, a Franciscan who came to the New Kingdom of Granada in 1604, set the tale down in his history of the conquest, printed in 1626, close to ninety years after the Spanish reached the plain. He was writing about a religion his own order was working to end, and he knew his Bible and his classics. A flood sent to punish a sinful people and a giant made to carry the world are shapes a friar of his time would have recognised at once, and how much of the telling is Muisca and how much is Simón cannot now be separated. What can be said is that the geography is exact. The savanna was a lake in the deep past, the falls are where the story puts them, and the central Andes shake.

His powers follow from what he was: rain, storm, the rivers of one high plain, and after his sentence the stability of the ground itself. His limits are just as plain. He could flood a valley but could not hold it against Bochica, who undid in an evening what the rivers had taken days to do. He could not refuse the load. And he cannot put it down. The most he can do is change shoulders, and the whole plateau feels it when he does.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Chibchacúm?

Chibchacúm is a god of the Muisca people of highland Colombia. He was the patron of the Bogotá savanna and the protector of its merchants, goldsmiths and farmers, with power over rain and thunder. After he flooded the savanna, the god Bochica punished him by making him carry the earth on his shoulders.

Why did Chibchacúm flood the Bogotá savanna?

Chibchacúm flooded the savanna because its people had offended him, though the record does not say exactly how. He turned the Sopó and Tibitó rivers onto the plain, which had no outlet, and the water drowned the fields and towns. The people fled to the hilltops and called on Bochica for help.

How were the Tequendama Falls created in Muisca myth?

In Muisca myth, Bochica created the Tequendama Falls to drain Chibchacúm’s flood. He appeared on a rainbow over Soacha and threw his golden staff at the rock wall on the rim of the savanna. The rock split and the floodwater poured out through the gap, forming the falls.

Why does Chibchacúm cause earthquakes?

Chibchacúm causes earthquakes because he carries the earth on his shoulders as a punishment from Bochica. Before that, the earth rested on posts of guayacán wood. When Chibchacúm grows tired and shifts the weight from one shoulder to the other, the ground shakes.

Where does the story of Chibchacúm come from?

The story of Chibchacúm comes mainly from Fray Pedro Simón, a Franciscan friar who arrived in the New Kingdom of Granada in 1604. He recorded it in his history of the conquest, printed in 1626, close to ninety years after the Spanish reached the Muisca. No description of Chibchacúm’s appearance or origin survives.