Kueyen

Also Known As: (Küyen, Kuyén); the word is Mapudungun for both the moon and the month
Region/Culture: South America
Mythos: Mapuche Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: The moon governs fertility and growth, fixes the sex and the lifespan of a child at birth, and lends the machi the power by which she heals.
Role in Mythos: Küyen is the feminine pole of the Mapuche sky and the counterpart of the sun Antü, and in the machi’s account of the cosmos the moon gods stand among the highest of the major gods.
Relation to Humans: She births people, feeds them, gives them luck and health, and hands her authority down to the machi, who is her representative on the earth. She is also the clock: the month, the thirteen-month year, and the timing of the ngillatun have all been kept by watching her.

A man on the Andean slope pulls a length of woven wool up in front of his eyes and looks at the moon through the weave. The nearer she is to full, the more squares of the cloth take her light, and he counts them, checking the tally he has been keeping in his head since the month began. He is not doing anything unusual. In the pewenche country under the araucaria forests, this is simply how a person knows what day it is.

Küyen is the moon. The word carries the body in the sky and the month it measures, and that double duty is her whole office in miniature. She is not a decoration on the night. She is an instrument, and people read her.

Ask a machi to lay out the sky and you do not get a single goddess with a biography. You get families. The Mapuche cosmos is built in fours, and near the top of it sit the meli küyen, the four gods of the moon, ranked above the morning star and above the four gods of the stars. They are gods of fertility. They govern human procreation, animal procreation, and the germination of seed in the ground. They set the sex of a child before it is born and the length of the life it will get. One old testimony puts it flatly: küyen is what births us, gives the family, gives the raising of it, calls luck, silver, livestock.

She does not work alone. The moon, the morning star and the star gods form a single cosmic health team, and between them they prevent and cure sickness. They light, and they give life. The machi is their agent on the ground, which is why her rewe carries the star on its banners, and why the whole apparatus of Mapuche healing is understood to run on borrowed sky-power. When the ethnographers pressed the point, they found something quietly revealing: while most Mapuche put the four chief gods at the summit of the pantheon, some machi put the moon there instead, above everything. The moon governs health. The machi’s work is health. It does not take much to see where the ranking came from.

In parts of the central valley the machi and the lonko settle the date of the ngillatun together, and the date they choose is the full moon, because that is when the machi’s powers stand at their peak. Wool banners, a crowd, a hundred and more people gathered on cold ground; the ceremony can run for days, depending on the size of what is being asked for. In the high pewenche communities where there is no machi at all, the phase of the moon is not consulted and the lonko simply watches the weather.

The sun is her polar partner, and the relationship is stranger than the pretty version suggests. Antü rises, dries the crops and ripens them, and Antü is also këtral mapu, the land of fire. Life belongs to the moon and death to the sun. One Mapuche informant put the arrangement in a single sentence: küyen is the one who bore us, but antü is the one who carries us off. Because the sun is ambiguous, and because in this system anything ambiguous or intermediate leans toward the bad, some accounts group the sun with the forces of evil outright. The moon has no such shadow on her.

Nothing in that record makes her the sun’s obedient bride. The version that circulates in popular writing, in which Kueyen is Antü’s favourite wife and the ruler of the star spirits, is a modern tidying of something less orderly. The pairing is real; the male and female poles of the sky are attested and structural. The wedding and the throne are not.

She can die, briefly. A lunar eclipse is called Lan Küyen, the temporary death of the moon, exactly as a solar eclipse is Lan Antü. The solar death is held to be the worse of the two, since the sun carries more weight in the vital process of the people, and when the light comes back there is enormous relief and the ngillatun and the llellipun are performed. The moon’s death is the smaller terror. It is still a death.

Nobody in the sources describes her face. There is no chariot, no wolf at her heels, no abduction, no lover. She is the moon, and the tradition looks at what the moon actually does: swell, shrink, cross the stars, come round again.

Her powers all follow from that. She measures. The traditional year runs thirteen months of twenty-eight days, opening at We Tripantü, and the second pewenche month is still called San Carmen Küyen, a Catholic saint’s feast grafted straight onto a moon-month. Her limits follow from it too. Twenty-eight days is not a lunation. It sits close to the sidereal month of 27.3 days, the time the moon takes to return to the same star, and roughly a day and a half short of the round of phases, so the phase at the start of each month visibly slips. Every informant knew it. The moon alone will not tell you the date, which is why the man with the cloth over his eyes is also counting in his head.

Her other weakness is not hers. The knowledge of the cosmos was held closely, guarded from the winka, carried by machi and lonko and the ritual specialists, and the old calendar has now been almost entirely replaced by the Gregorian one. The reckoning survives in the memory of old people who can still tell you, without hesitating, that the baby born in March is three months and nineteen days old.

In March 1999, on a mountain in the Atacama, the second of the four great telescopes at Paranal opened its eye for the first time. The European Southern Observatory had given the four of them Mapuche names for things in the sky. That one is Kueyen.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Kueyen in Mapuche mythology?

Kueyen is the moon. In Mapudungun the word küyen means both the moon and the month, and in Mapuche belief the moon is a power of fertility and healing rather than a decorative light. In the accounts machi gave to ethnographers, the moon is not one goddess but the meli küyen, a family of four moon gods ranked among the highest in the pantheon.

What does Kueyen do?

Kueyen governs procreation in people and animals and the germination of seed in the earth, and is held to fix the sex of a child and the length of its life. Together with the morning star and the star gods, the moon forms a cosmic health team responsible for preventing and curing illness. The machi, the Mapuche healer, works with power delegated from the moon.

Is Kueyen the wife of Antü, the sun?

The sun and the moon are the masculine and feminine poles of the Mapuche sky and are always understood as a pair, but the story that Kueyen is Antü’s favourite wife and the ruler of the star spirits is a modern popular embellishment rather than something the ethnographic record supports. What the record does describe is a polarity: life is associated with the moon and death with the sun. One Mapuche account says küyen is the one who bore us and antü is the one who carries us off.

What is Lan Küyen?

Lan Küyen is the Mapuche name for a lunar eclipse and means the temporary death of the moon. A solar eclipse is called Lan Antü by the same logic, and is regarded as the more serious of the two events, since the sun carries greater weight in the life of the people. When the light returns, the ngillatun and llellipun ceremonies are performed.

Why is a telescope in Chile named Kueyen?

The European Southern Observatory named the four 8.2-metre Unit Telescopes of the Very Large Telescope at Paranal with Mapuche words for objects in the sky. Kueyen, the moon, is the second of them, and achieved first light in March 1999. Its companions are Antu, Melipal and Yepun.