Wekufe

Somewhere in the rain country of southern Chile a woman wakes with a weight on her chest that was not there when she lay down. The fire has gone to grey ash. Outside, the wet laurel forest is dripping. By morning she cannot keep water down, and by the third day her family has stopped talking about the weather and started talking about who might wish her harm. That is how a wekufe announces itself. Not with a face. With a fever.

The word belongs to Mapudungun, the language of the Mapuche of southern Chile and the Argentine side of the Andes, and it has reached print in more spellings than almost any other term in the region: wekufü, huecuvu, huecubu, güecubo, watuku, uecuvu. Spanish ears did what Spanish ears did. What survived the confusion is a category rather than a creature. A wekufe is whatever arrives to break the balance of the world, and Mapuche belief never needed it to have a shape before naming it.

That is the reverse of how most monsters work, and it is why the entry resists illustration. Ethnographers who tried to sort the wekufe ended up with a rough grading rather than a portrait: some are natural phenomena, some are ghosts, and some come in animal form. The same broad word can be turned on a person who lies or deceives, with no supernatural claim attached at all. Later collectors used it as a heading and filed the named creatures of Chilean folklore beneath it, so the chonchón and the cherufe and the flying cowhide all end up called wekufe by someone. Underneath the label, the working meaning stayed simple. Something got in that should not have.

Missionaries arriving behind the conquistadors recognised an opportunity and took it. They put their own devil into the word, and a term for imbalance and affliction hardened into a term for evil in the Christian sense, which it had not previously carried in that shape. Four centuries on, both meanings are still in circulation, and the older one has proved the more durable of the two.

A wekufe on its own is loose weather. It becomes personal when a kalku takes hold of it. The kalku is the Mapuche sorcerer, more often a woman than a man, trained by another kalku, and the mechanism she uses is intimate rather than theatrical. She takes something that carries the victim’s essence, an image, a piece of the body or its humours, and binds it to the wekufe, to a dead person, or to the world below. The forces are set moving when someone who envies a neighbour comes to her and asks. Misfortune in this system is not random and it is not impersonal. It has an address, and the address is usually next door.

Against that stands the machi. Today most machi are women, though men practised widely before the reservation era, and the calling arrives unbidden through dreams, visions, or a long dangerous illness survived. Training runs two to four years under a senior machi and covers herbal lore, diagnosis, divination and ventriloquism, and ends with the machiwüllun, a public demonstration of competence before other machi and the community. The tools are a step-notched pole called a rewe and a drum called a kultrung. Each kultrung is built to its owner’s own design and is not a simple object: a base of dried laurel trunk, a head of goat hide laced on with horsehide twine, small bright likan stones sealed inside to stand for stars, a blue-grey pigment ground from hill mud and stone, and the four quarters of the world painted across the skin in a red that is often horse blood.

In the machitún the machi drums, enters trance, and goes after the thing in the patient. A helper called the thungunmachife stands by to translate what she says while she is gone, because the language she speaks in trance is not the language of the room. What she is trying to do is get the wekufe out. A body with one in it has its own name in the secret speech of the machi, and the ceremony exists for exactly this purpose and no other.

Where wekufe come from depends on who is answering. Mapuche scholars describe a cosmos in three vertical parts: Wenu Mapu above, where the beneficial deities and the old ancestors are; Nag Mapu, the land where the living move about, good and bad together; and Minche Mapu beneath, where spirits of both kinds dwell. Beyond that the accounts get much more elaborate, and it is worth knowing where the elaboration comes from. The tidy scheme that circulates in English, with a sealed underworld, a war among the Pillán, a western realm of evil and wekufe that are soulless by definition, traces largely to a twentieth-century esoteric compilation attributed to Aukanaw, assembled after his death and shelved by most libraries under esotericism rather than anthropology. It is not the field record. It is one man’s synthesis, and it has quietly become the version most readers meet first.

The field record is plainer and, in its way, better. Writing on Llanquihue and Valdivia in 1913, Bernardo Gotschlich recorded that in the far south the wekufe were held to serve the Pillán, bringing disease into the house, the cattle and the fields, and that the remedy was to burn branches of the foye, the sacred canelo. Smoke against sickness. Nothing more complicated than that.

The limits of a wekufe follow from what it is. It has no project of its own and no fixed body to be wounded, so it cannot be fought in the way a monster is fought; it can only be blocked, expelled or kept in check. The Ngen and the Pillán restrain it so long as people keep the admapu and hold the ngillatun. The machi can drive it out once it is in. And the last limit is the least dramatic and the most telling: contemporary Mapuche distinguish two kinds of sickness, one caused by supernatural agents like the wekufe, one caused by natural or environmental factors. The machi treats both, with herbs and with ritual. The category has narrowed without ever going away. Out on the cold windy plateaus of Patagonia there are still stretches of country called Wekufe Mapu, land of the wekufe, which is the local way of saying that nothing good grows there and nobody should try.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a wekufe?

A wekufe is a harmful spirit in Mapuche belief, blamed for illness, death, drought and other calamity. The word is a category rather than the name of one being, covering natural phenomena, ghosts and beings in animal form, and it comes from the Mapudungun wekufü, usually glossed as demon or harmful outside being.

What does a wekufe look like?

There is no single agreed appearance. Sources describe wekufe as sometimes having solid material bodies, sometimes ghost-like ones, and sometimes no body at all, which is why the tradition identifies a wekufe by its effects rather than its looks. Ethnographers grade them into three loose types: natural phenomena, ghosts, and zoomorphic beings.

Who controls the wekufe?

A kalku, the Mapuche sorcerer, directs wekufe against chosen victims, typically at the request of someone who envies the target. The kalku links an image, a possession or something of the victim’s body to the wekufe, to a dead person or to the world below, and the harm travels along that connection.

How do you get rid of a wekufe?

The machi, the Mapuche shaman, removes a wekufe from a person in a healing ceremony called the machitún, drumming on the kultrung and entering trance to confront it. In the south of Chile, burning branches of the foye, the sacred canelo tree, was recorded as a remedy for wekufe afflicting a house, its cattle and its fields.

Is the wekufe the same as the Christian devil?

No. Missionaries arriving with the Spanish used wekufe as a translation for devil and demon, which attached a Christian sense of evil to a word that had meant something closer to imbalance and affliction. Both meanings remain in use, and the older Mapuche sense is the one that survives in healing practice.

Related Entries

Pillan, Ngen, Ngenechen, Cherufe, Chonchon, Colo Colo, Nguruvilu, Peuchen, Trentren-Vilu, Caicai-Vilu, Antü, Gualichu, Camahueto, Basilisco Chilote, Trauco