Mapuche Mythology: The Complete Guide to the Fourfold Creator, the Serpent Flood, and the Spirits of Southern Chile
The Mapuche are the people who beat the Inca and then fought Spain to a standstill for three hundred years. While the Aztec and Inca empires fell within a generation of contact, the Mapuche of southern Chile and Argentina held the line at the Biobío River until the late nineteenth century — and their religion was never written down by a triumphant conquistador, never absorbed into a state cult, never “extirpated” the way Andean belief was. What survives comes largely from the Mapuche themselves, still spoken in Mapudungun, still practiced by the machi who lead ceremonies today. This is one of the few living indigenous American mythologies that was never broken.
That independence shows in the shape of the cosmos. Where the Inca built a sun-emperor and a state theology radiating out from Cusco, the Mapuche kept a religion rooted in kinship and land: every river, forest, and mountain has its spirit-owner, the dead become powers of thunder and volcano, and the supreme being is not a king in the sky but a family — old man, old woman, young man, young woman, fused into one. The forces that matter most are not distant gods but the Ngen, the owners of each particular place, and the Wekufe, the malevolent spirits a sorcerer can turn against a neighbor.
The primary sources are the Mapuche oral tradition itself, recorded by ethnographers from the nineteenth century onward, alongside the writings of the Jesuit Diego de Rosales, the chronicler-soldier Alonso de Ercilla — whose epic poem La Araucana immortalized the Mapuche war leaders — and twentieth-century fieldwork among the machi. Much overlaps with the closely related Chilote mythology of the Chiloé archipelago, where the same serpents and spirits take on local color.
What Makes Mapuche Mythology Different
The supreme god is four people at once. Ngenechen, the “owner of people,” is not a single figure but a fourfold being: an old man (fücha), an old woman (kushe), a young man (weche wentru), and a young woman (ülcha domo). Age and youth, male and female, are folded into one divinity, so that the highest power in the universe is itself a family and a complete society. This is a genuinely unusual conception of godhead — not a patriarch, not a couple, but a quaternity that contains the whole human life-cycle.
The dead do not rest — they become weather. When a great leader or warrior dies, he can be elevated to a Pillan, an ancestral spirit who lives on in the volcanoes and storms of the cordillera. Thunder is the Pillan speaking; eruptions are their anger. The Mapuche landscape of fire-mountains is literally populated by the honored dead, and the most powerful ancestors merge with the forces of the sky itself.
Sickness is sorcery, and the shaman is usually a woman. There is little notion of misfortune as random. Illness, drought, and death are the work of Wekufe — wicked spirits — directed by a kalku, a malevolent sorcerer. Against them stands the machi, the healer-shaman who is most often a woman (or a machi weye, a third-gender male shaman), climbing the carved rewe ladder-pole in trance to negotiate with the spirit world. Mapuche religion is overwhelmingly a contest between healing and cursing.
Everything has an owner. The Ngen are the spirit-guardians of nature — ngen-ko of the water, ngen-mawida of the forest, ngen-winkul of the hills. You do not simply take wood, water, or game; you ask the owner’s permission, because the natural world is not raw material but a community of proprietors. This is one of the most thoroughgoing systems of sacred ecology in any mythology.
The land itself was made by two serpents fighting. The fjords, islands, and mountains of southern Chile are not background scenery but the frozen wreckage of a cosmic battle between Caicai-Vilu, the sea serpent, and Trentren-Vilu, the earth serpent. Geography is myth here, and every earthquake and tidal surge is read as the serpents stirring again.
The Major Gods and Spirits
Mapuche divinity runs from a single supreme power at the top, through celestial deities and ancestral spirits, down to the countless spirit-owners of the land. There are no temples and no priestly hierarchy — the gods are reached through the machi in ceremony, above all the great Ngillatun fertility ritual.
The Supreme Power
Ngenechen — the supreme creator and “owner of people,” conceived as a fourfold being uniting old and young, male and female. He sustains the order of the world and holds the balance against the chaos of the wekufe. In contemporary practice Ngenechen is invoked above all others at the Ngillatun, the communal prayer-festival held to secure good harvests, rain, and the wellbeing of the people.
The Celestial Deities
Antü — the sun, the source of light and life and the most powerful of the Pillan-spirits, often regarded as the very face or dwelling of Ngenechen in the sky. Antü governs the daytime world and stands for benevolence, order, and the warmth without which nothing grows. He is married to the moon.
Kueyen — the moon, wife of Antü, ruler of the night and the feminine principle. Her phases mark time and ritual, and as Antü’s celestial consort she completes the great pairing of light and reflection that mirrors the dualities running through all of Mapuche thought.
Pillan — the powerful ancestral spirits of dead chiefs and warriors, masculine forces of thunder, lightning, volcanoes, and war who dwell in the high cordillera (the Wenu Mapu, the upper land). The Pillan are the elevated honored dead, intermediaries between the living and the divine, and the most fearsome of them are bound up with the great fire-mountains of the Andes.
The Spirit-Owners of the Land
Ngen — the spirit-owners who guard every feature of the natural world: the ngen-ko of springs and rivers, the ngen-mawida of the forest, the ngen-winkul of the hills, the ngen-kürüf of the wind. Each must be respected and asked permission before its domain is used. They are the theological heart of Mapuche ecology, the reason the land is treated as a society of owners rather than a resource.
Creatures, Monsters, and Supernatural Beings
The Mapuche bestiary is dominated by the wekufe — malevolent shape-shifting spirits — and by a rogues’ gallery of nocturnal horrors that a kalku can send against an enemy. Many of these creatures cross over into the Chilote tradition of the islands, where they acquired their most baroque forms.
The Wekufe and the Sorcerer’s Servants
Wekufe — the malignant spirits at the root of nearly all Mapuche misfortune, bringers of disease, death, and ruin. The word covers a whole class of beings, from the witranalwe (a gaunt, glowing horseman in the shape of a Spaniard) to the sumpall (a river-mermaid who drowns men and steals their souls). A kalku commands them; a machi fights them off.
Cherufe — a monstrous being of stone and magma that lives in the molten heart of volcanoes. The Cherufe causes eruptions and earthquakes, and in the oldest tellings it demanded human sacrifice: a maiden cast into the crater to satisfy its hunger, after which it would hurl her flaming skull across the sky. It is the volcanic violence of the Andes given a body and an appetite.
Chonchon — a human head transformed by sorcery, sprouting enormous ears that it beats like wings to fly through the night, crying “tué tué tué.” The Chonchon is the form a kalku takes — or sends — to do harm under cover of darkness; to hear its call is an omen of death, and only another sorcerer can bring it down.
Colo Colo — a rat-serpent hatched from a misshapen egg laid by an old rooster, a creature so unnatural that its birth is an omen of disaster. The Colo Colo nests in the cracks and corners of a house and creeps out at night to drink the saliva of sleeping people, draining their life until they sicken and die. It is the Mapuche kin of the Basilisco Chilote, the cockatrice of the islands.
Peuchen — a shape-shifting vampire-spirit usually pictured as a gigantic flying serpent, though it can take any form it pleases. The Peuchen drains the blood of livestock and people, and its gaze can paralyze; only a machi has the power to kill one. It is the Mapuche answer to the question of why an animal is found bloodless and dead in the morning.
The World-Shaping Serpents
Caicai-Vilu — the great sea serpent, lord of the water, whose rage raises floods and tsunamis. In the central Mapuche-Chilote creation legend, Caicai-Vilu rose against humanity and tried to drown the world; the channels, sounds, and islands of southern Chile are the lasting mark of his fury.
Trentren-Vilu — the earth serpent and Caicai-Vilu’s eternal adversary, who lifts the land and the people above the rising water. The mountains of the south are the height to which Trentren-Vilu raised the ground to save those who survived the flood.
Cousins from the Chilote Islands
Camahueto — a young horned bull-calf, sometimes single-horned like a unicorn, that bursts from the earth and tears down to the sea, carving ravines as it goes; machi hunt it for the powerful healing substance of its horn. Imbunche — a guardian-monster made by sorcerers from a stolen infant, deformed and contorted so that its head is twisted to face backward, set to guard a kalku’s cave. Nguruvilu — the fox-snake, a fox-headed serpent that lurks in river fords, lashing its clawed tail to drag waders down into deadly whirlpools. These island beings show how the Mapuche imagination flowered in the wet forests of Chiloé.
The Central Myths
The Battle of Trentren-Vilu and Caicai-Vilu
The foundational Mapuche-Chilote myth tells of two colossal serpents, the children of rival pillan. Caicai-Vilu, serpent of the sea, grew enraged at how humans abused the waters and rose up to flood the world, summoning rain and tidal waves to drown all life. Trentren-Vilu, serpent of the earth, came to humanity’s defense, lifting the hills higher and higher to carry the people above the swelling sea, teaching them to climb and giving the slow the gift of becoming birds, fish, and stones so they would not drown. The two serpents fought until both were exhausted; the water finally receded, but the land had been remade forever into the jagged archipelago of southern Chile.
Why it matters: this is sacred geography in its purest form. The myth doesn’t just explain how the world began — it explains the specific coastline the Mapuche live on, and it makes every earthquake and flood a continuation of a story that never fully ended. The serpents did not die; they sleep, and they can stir again.
The Sun, the Moon, and the Order of the Sky
Antü the sun and Kueyen the moon ride the heavens as husband and wife, their daily and monthly journeys setting the rhythm of light and darkness, planting and harvest. Antü, mightiest of the Pillan and the radiance of Ngenechen himself, holds the daytime against the powers of chaos; Kueyen rules the night and the tides of women’s lives. Their marriage is the model for the dualities — day and night, male and female, order and disorder — that structure the entire Mapuche cosmos.
Why it matters: the celestial marriage is the template for complementarity, the principle that opposing forces must be paired and balanced rather than one conquering the other. It is the same logic that makes Ngenechen fourfold and that organizes Mapuche ceremony, where east faces the rising Antü and every ritual seeks equilibrium.
The Machi and the Rewe
In the central rite of Mapuche religion, the machi — the shaman, usually a woman — enters trance to travel between the worlds. She climbs the rewe, a carved step-notched pole that is an axis between the Wenu Mapu above and the earth below, beating the kultrun drum painted with the four quarters of the cosmos, calling on Ngenechen and the ancestral Pillan and battling the Wekufe that have made her patient sick. Her opposite is the kalku, the sorcerer who sends those same spirits to harm.
Why it matters: this is the living engine of the tradition. Unlike the fossilized state religions of the Aztec and Inca, Mapuche belief survives as practice — the machi still climbs the rewe today — and it places spiritual authority overwhelmingly in the hands of women, a striking inversion of the warrior society around it.
The Afterlife and Cosmology
The Mapuche cosmos is built in vertical layers, and the layers are at war. At the top is the Wenu Mapu, the upper land — pure, orderly, the home of Ngenechen, the sun Antü, the moon Kueyen, and the ancestral Pillan. Below it lies the Nag Mapu, the earth where humans, animals, and the Ngen live and where the forces of good and evil contend daily. Beneath everything is the Minche Mapu, the lower land, source of the destructive Wekufe. The three planes are locked in perpetual struggle, and the job of religion is to keep the upper, ordering powers from being overwhelmed by the chaos below.
The dead do not face judgment. After death the soul — the am or püllü — crosses west over the sea to Ngill chenmaywe, an island of the dead reached by a passage often guarded by a ferrying whale, Trempulkalwe, in the form of four old women. There is no heaven for the virtuous and no hell for the wicked; the afterlife is simply elsewhere, across the water in the direction of the setting sun. But the most powerful dead never make that crossing. The great chiefs and warriors instead ascend to become Pillan, merging with the thunder and the volcanoes — so that the cordillera of fire-mountains looming over Mapuche country is, quite literally, the dwelling of the ancestors.
How Mapuche Mythology Connects to Other Traditions
The most immediate kinship is with the Chilote and broader Chilean tradition of the Chiloé archipelago, which is essentially Mapuche belief grown lush in the rain-forest islands: the serpents Caicai-Vilu and Trentren-Vilu are shared, and creatures like the Camahueto, Imbunche, and the seductive Trauco are the island offspring of the mainland imagination.
To the north, the Mapuche brushed against the Inca — and stopped them. The two share the wider world of Andean mythology, with its sacred mountains and earth-reverence, but the Mapuche never developed the Inca’s sun-emperor or the great earth-mother Pachamama as a single state goddess; their sacred ecology stayed local, lodged in the countless Ngen rather than centralized in one imperial cult.
The deepest cross-cultural parallel is structural. The elevation of dead warriors into thunder-spirits — the Pillan — echoes the storm-and-ancestor gods of traditions worldwide, from the Norse honored dead to the North American Thunderbird, a sky-being likewise born of storm and power. And the flood that remakes the world is one of humanity’s most universal myths, here told not as divine punishment but as a contest between two serpents — a distinctively Mapuche reframing of a global story.
Where to Start Reading
Begin with Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana (1569–1589), the Spanish epic poem whose grudging admiration for the Mapuche war leaders Caupolicán and Lautaro made them legends across the Hispanic world — a primary window onto sixteenth-century Mapuche society, even if filtered through a colonial eye. For the religious world specifically, the Jesuit Diego de Rosales’s seventeenth-century Historia general del Reino de Chile preserves early observations of belief and ritual.
For modern readers, the anthropologist Louis Faron’s Hawks of the Sun and Mapuche Social Structure remain standard introductions to Mapuche cosmology and ritual, and Ana Mariella Bacigalupo’s Shamans of the Foye Tree is the essential contemporary study of the machi and the gendered spiritual world they inhabit. Together they move from the sixteenth-century war to the living religion still practiced in Araucanía today.
Explore Mapuche Mythology on Gods and Monsters
Gods and Monsters has 11 Mapuche entries, with many more from the closely linked Chilote and South American traditions.
Ngenechen · Antü · Kueyen · Pillan · Ngen · Wekufe · Cherufe · Chonchon · Colo Colo · Peuchen · Caicai-Vilu · Trentren-Vilu · Nguruvilu · Camahueto · Imbunche · Basilisco Chilote · Trauco
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is the main god of the Mapuche?
The supreme being is Ngenechen, the “owner of people,” understood not as a single figure but as a fourfold being — old man, old woman, young man, and young woman in one. He sustains the order of the world and is invoked above all others at the great Ngillatun prayer-festival. Below him the sun Antü and the moon Kueyen order the sky, and the ancestral Pillan govern thunder and volcano.
What is the Mapuche creation myth?
The central myth is the battle of the serpents Caicai-Vilu and Trentren-Vilu. Caicai-Vilu, lord of the sea, rose to flood the world; Trentren-Vilu, lord of the earth, raised the mountains to lift the people above the water and turned some into birds, fish, and stone so they would survive. Their exhausting battle reshaped the land into the islands and channels of southern Chile, which is why the myth doubles as an explanation of the region’s dramatic geography.
What is a Cherufe?
The Cherufe is a monstrous being of stone and lava that dwells inside volcanoes and causes eruptions and earthquakes. In older traditions it demanded the sacrifice of a young woman thrown into the crater, after which it would fling her burning skull across the sky. It is essentially the destructive volcanic power of the Andes given a body, an appetite, and a will.
Are the Mapuche still around today?
Yes. The Mapuche are the largest indigenous group in Chile, numbering well over a million, with a substantial population in Argentina as well. They famously resisted both Inca and Spanish conquest, holding their southern territory independent until the late nineteenth century, and their religion is still living: machi shamans continue to lead healing rites and the communal Ngillatun ceremony, and Mapudungun is still spoken. This is one reason their mythology was never “extirpated” like the religions of conquered empires.
What is a machi?
A machi is a Mapuche shaman and healer — most often a woman, or a third-gender machi weye — who mediates between the human world and the spirits. In trance she climbs the carved rewe pole and beats the kultrun drum to reach Ngenechen and the Pillan, and to drive out the Wekufe that cause illness. Her dark counterpart is the kalku, a sorcerer who commands those same evil spirits to harm others.
How is Mapuche mythology different from Inca mythology?
Both belong to the wider Andean world of sacred mountains, but they are organized very differently. Inca religion was a centralized state cult built around a sun-emperor and the earth-mother Pachamama, radiating out from Cusco. Mapuche belief has no empire, no temples, and no priestly hierarchy: its sacred power is local, lodged in the countless Ngen who own each river and forest, and reached through the machi. The Mapuche also stopped the Inca advance militarily, which kept their religion independent of Andean imperial theology.
