Machi

Also Known As: Mapudungun machi, the ritual healer of the Mapuche; plural pu machi; a man who holds the office is a machi weye
Region/Culture: South America
Mythos: Mapuche Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: The machi enters küymi, the trance in which her voice is no longer wholly her own, and climbs the notched pole outside her door to carry a petition into the sky.
Role in Mythos: She is the hinge between the land people walk on and the land above it, holding the balance that sickness, sorcery and grief keep knocking loose.
Relation to Humans: A machi is a neighbour before she is anything else, consulted for a fever, a failing harvest, a dream that will not stop repeating. She is also the person most easily accused when a cure fails, because the same power that heals is understood to be capable of harm.

The pole stands to the right of the door, a canelo trunk taller than the house it guards, steps cut into its face and a human head carved at the top. Rain has blackened the wood and split it along the grain. No other house in the settlement has one. It marks where a machi lives, and the steps are not ornament. They are a count.

A new machi receives a plain shaft called a kemukemu. It becomes a rewe only in the ceremony that consecrates her, and the first rewe carries four steps for the four sacred quarters. Every power she later earns is cut into the wood as another step. The example the Smithsonian holds, collected at Collico in Chile around 1920 and standing nearly three metres, has eight. Whoever owned it had been climbing a long time.

Mapuche religion built no temples and ordained no priesthood. A clearing of trees is the sanctuary. The machi is the closest thing the tradition has to clergy, and she is nothing like clergy: she has a house, a garden, relatives who argue with her, and a queue of people at the gate with headaches and lawsuits and children who will not sleep. The office is usually held by women. It was more often held by men before the Chilean state made that dangerous.

Nobody chooses it. The call arrives as a perimontun, a vision in which a spirit shows itself and does not leave, or as an illness that no ordinary remedy touches and that lifts only when the sufferer agrees to what is being asked. The spirit that does the asking is not a stranger. It has held the office before, in another body, and it is coming back to work. Refusal is possible and expensive. What follows is a long apprenticeship under an older machi, learning the songs, the drum, the hundreds of lawen that grow in the forest and the bog, and it ends in the ngeykurewen, the rite that raises the pole and makes the neophyte a machi in front of everyone who will afterwards depend on her.

The silver is not decoration either. A trapelacucha hangs on her chest, incised with sunbursts and equal-armed crosses, and it is worn because silver turns away what would otherwise get in. The same cross is painted across the head of her kultrun, dividing the drumskin into the four lands of east, north, sea and south, so that the instrument she strikes is a small model of the world she is about to move through.

The healing rite is called machitun and it starts with fire. Canelo leaves go into the flame and the smoke smells green and peppery. The drum begins, one flat beat repeating until the room stops keeping time by anything else, and somewhere in that repetition the machi’s speech changes register and stops being addressed to the people in the room. This is where the dungumachife earns his place. He stands close, listens, and turns what she is saying back into language the family can act on. Afterwards there are herbs, tobacco blown over the patient, hands working the body, and the ordinary business of telling a frightened household what to do next.

Her authority runs on paradox, and the tradition says so openly. The foye, the canelo that gives her the pole and the burning leaves, carries flowers with both male and female parts in the same bloom, and the machi’s power moves the same way, refusing to sit on one side. A machi’s gender follows the calling rather than the body, which is why a man who becomes machi weye takes on a role coded feminine and has been punished for it by outsiders for three centuries. Chilean officialdom spent most of that time filing machi under witchcraft and sexual deviance, and the word witch is still the first insult reached for.

In the community of Millali, the record of one spirit runs across two lifetimes. Rosa Kurin held it in the nineteenth century and was remembered afterwards not as a savage but as the one who stood between the settlement and the settlers. More than fifty years after her death, the same spirit surfaced in Francisca Kolipi, who worked the office until her own death and who wanted her life written down as a book that would function as a ritual object, so that whoever the spirit came to next would have something to hold. The particulars of a machi’s life are allowed to fade on purpose. What survives the forgetting is the spirit, and it is expected back.

The powers follow from the position rather than from the person. She can diagnose what is wrong by listening to a voice that is not hers, negotiate with Ngenechen for rain or for a life, drive off a wekufe that has attached itself to a household, and read the difference between an illness that came from a germ and one that came from a neighbour. She can travel in trance to places and to times she has never been, and bring back something usable.

The limits are equally structural. She cannot climb without a community to raise and renew her pole, and a rewe left untended is just a rotting trunk. She cannot outrun the accusation that shadows the office, because the neighbour who believes a kalku sent the sickness may next year believe the machi did. The trance costs her body, and the ceremonies that restore her cost the family that hosts them. Above all she is human and mortal, one link in a chain she does not own, holding an office that will empty when she dies and wait, sometimes for decades, for the spirit to choose again.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a machi in Mapuche culture?

A machi is the ritual healer and spiritual authority of the Mapuche people of southern Chile and adjacent Argentina. The machi diagnoses and treats illness, leads ceremonies, and acts as the intermediary between the human world and the world above. The role is most often held by women, and machi are living practitioners today, not figures from a closed past.

What is the rewe pole outside a machi’s house?

The rewe is a step-notched pole, usually of canelo wood, planted in front of the machi’s home and used as her route to the wenu mapu, the sky world where the deities live. A new machi’s first rewe carries four steps for the four sacred quarters, and additional steps are carved as she gains further spiritual powers. Before consecration the plain shaft is called a kemukemu; the ngeykurewen ceremony turns it into a rewe.

How does someone become a machi?

The role begins with a calling rather than a choice, typically a vision called perimontun or a persistent illness that only resolves when the person accepts. The candidate then trains for years under an established machi, learning ritual songs, the drum, and the medicinal plants known as lawen, before being consecrated in a public ceremony that raises her rewe.

What is the machi’s drum called and what do the markings mean?

The drum is the kultrun, a shallow ceremonial drum struck to carry the machi into trance. Its head is painted with an equal-armed cross that divides the surface into four sections representing the lands of the east, north, sea and south, making the drum a small map of the Mapuche cosmos.

Can men be machi?

Yes. A male machi is called a machi weye, and men held the office more commonly in earlier centuries. Because the role carries feminine associations, male machi have faced sustained hostility from Chilean authorities and outsiders, who for generations classified machi generally as witches and sexual deviants.