Epunamun

Also Known As: Mapudungun epu namun, “two feet”; Eponamón in Alonso de Ercilla; Epuñamuñ in later missionary spelling
Region/Culture: South America
Mythos: Mapuche Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: Epunamun is the spirit the Mapuche consulted before battle and the name on which their most binding oaths were sworn.
Role in Mythos: He is the voice of the war council, whom Spanish chroniclers called the Mars of the Araucanians and ranked among the lesser powers under Pillán.
Relation to Humans: Warriors asked him whether to fight and held back if the answer was bad. One chronicler adds that they did not trust his advice and followed it anyway, because disobeying him seemed the greater risk.

The army is already on the road to La Imperial when the sky closes over it. Cloud piles on cloud. Hail comes down hard, then stones of ice, then thunder, and a whirlwind lifts whatever it touches. In the middle of this a dragon appears, its tail coiled and its body wrapped in fire, and it speaks to the warriors in a thick, hoarse voice. The Spanish town ahead is frightened, it says. March fast, take it from any side, and leave no man alive and no wall standing. Then it comes apart into smoke.

That is the most famous appearance of Epunamun, and it was written by an enemy. Alonso de Ercilla was a Spanish soldier who fought the Mapuche in Chile and turned the war into an epic poem, La Araucana, whose first part was printed in 1569. He spells the name Eponamón, and in the short glossary he added to the poem he explains it in one line: it is the name these people give to the devil, and they swear by it when they mean to bind themselves beyond any going back. So the first European to write the name down had already decided what it meant.

Underneath the Spanish reading there is something older and plainer. Ercilla himself describes it early in the poem. Before a battle the war leaders put the question to this power in a rite of their own. If the answer came back bad, they did not fight, however much they wanted to. No serious business was settled without calling on him. Ercilla adds a detail that sits oddly with the word devil: the same name, he says, was commonly given to any man who was brave. His warriors swear by “the strong” and “the powerful” Eponamón the way a Spaniard of the time swore by a saint.

The name is Mapudungun, and it is not mysterious. Epu is two. Namun is foot. Epunamun is Two Feet. Nobody recorded why.

Later writers tried to fit him into a system. The Jesuit Juan Ignacio Molina, a Chilean writing in exile in Italy in 1787, laid out Mapuche belief as a mirror of Mapuche politics. Pillán sat at the top as the great war chief of the unseen world, and beneath him served a first rank of lesser gods. Epunamun was one of them, and Molina gave him a single phrase: he is their Mars, the god of war. Beside him stood Meulen, who was kind to people, and Guecubu, who was blamed for everything from a tired horse to an earthquake. Molina says nothing more about the war god than his title.

Other chroniclers were less respectful and more interesting. One, quoted by the Chilean ethnographer Tomás Guevara, says that nearly all the goblin stories of the country were told about Epunamun, and that the people had no flattering idea of how he looked. His legs were enormous, very strong and badly made. His arms were long and tough. The rest of him was ordinary. A second chronicler compares him directly to the duende, the house goblin of Spanish belief, and gives the best single sentence anyone wrote about him. He talks to them, this writer says, and they have no confidence in his advice, yet they often follow it, because they are afraid of offending him by not doing so.

A god of war that nobody quite trusts is an unusual thing. Here is how it looked in practice. A council sits before a raid, the question is put, and an answer comes. The men hearing it suspect it may be wrong. They pick up their lances regardless. Ercilla shows the other side in the scene before the storm, where an old diviner named Puchecalco calls “black Eponamón” as his witness and tells the assembled chiefs what he sees coming. He describes the spirit soaked in the warm blood of his own people, reaching out a hooked claw.

The dragon on the road gets no better result. As soon as it dissolves, the storm stops, the sky clears, and a woman comes down on a cloud in a white veil, brighter than the noon sun, with a white-haired old man beside her. She tells the warriors, gently, to go home and leave La Imperial alone. They stare at each other without a word. Then the whole army turns for Arauco and runs. The episode is Christian propaganda, and it also happens to match what the plainer chroniclers say: Epunamun’s advice was loud and it was not reliable.

How he began is not recorded anywhere. There is no birth, no parent, and no story of how the first war chief came to ask him anything. A missionary of Guevara’s day heard the name Epuñamuñ still spoken in certain ceremonies south of the Imperial River, and understood it differently. To him it pointed at doubleness, the two-in-one nature of a sky power the same people addressed as father and mother, old man and old woman, Two Faces and Two Heads. On that reading Two Feet is less a goblin than a title of something very large.

His power, in every account, is knowledge of how a fight will go, and the authority to seal a promise. An oath on his name could not be taken back. His limits are just as clear. He advises and does not fight. His counsel can be wrong, and those who heard it knew that. And he could be forgotten. Guevara, collecting among Mapuche families early in the twentieth century, found that the figure had already gone from memory during the century before, and that the people he spoke with had no idea of Epunamun at all.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Epunamun in Mapuche mythology?

Epunamun is the Mapuche spirit of war, a power that warriors consulted before battle to learn how the fight would go. Spanish chroniclers called him the Mars of the Araucanians, and Juan Ignacio Molina placed him among the lesser gods serving under Pillán. Mapuche warriors also swore their most binding oaths by his name.

What does the name Epunamun mean?

Epunamun means “two feet” in Mapudungun, from epu, two, and namun, foot. No early source explains why the spirit was called this. A later missionary linked the name to the double, two-in-one nature of a sky power that was also addressed as Two Faces and Two Heads.

What does Epunamun look like?

The sources do not agree on what Epunamun looks like. One chronicler describes huge, strong, badly formed legs, long tough arms and an otherwise ordinary body. In Alonso de Ercilla’s poem La Araucana he appears once as a fearsome dragon with a coiled tail, wrapped in fire.

Is Epunamun a devil?

Alonso de Ercilla defined Eponamón as the name the Mapuche gave to the devil, but that is a Spanish soldier’s reading from 1569. Ercilla’s own poem shows him as a war oracle and a name of honour given to brave men. Other chroniclers compared Epunamun to a goblin whose advice was not trusted but was followed out of fear of offending him.

What happens when Epunamun appears in La Araucana?

In La Araucana, Epunamun appears in a violent storm as a fiery dragon and orders a Mapuche army to hurry on and destroy the Spanish town of La Imperial. He then dissolves into smoke. A shining woman in a white veil appears next and tells the army to go home, and the warriors turn back to Arauco.