Máip
Tehuelche · deity · Tehuelche traditional religion; continuing · Recorded classification
Máip is the great maleficent power of the southern Tehuelche, glossed as 'the murderous wind'. It is bound up with darkness, with the shadow (and, in the modern ethnography, with any flat likeness such as a drawing or photograph), with cold, bad luck and death or a death-like state. Unlike the high god, Máip was not beseeched but feared. In the Elal cycle it allies with the cold and the snow to attack the culture-hero as he comes down from the mountain. Máip occupies, in the strictly Tehuelche tradition, the place that the borrowed term Gualichu (Gonaxke) came to fill under Mapuche influence as a general name for the malign and the cause of all sickness and misfortune.
Domains
- wind and storm
- darkness and shadow
- death and the dead
Powers
- to kill with the cold murderous wind of the southern steppe
- to seize a person through their shadow or any flat likeness of them
Epithets
Relations
- enemy: ElalAs the spirit of deadly cold and darkness, Máip is the adversary of the warmth- and life-bringing Elal, and assails the hero with ice and snow on the mountain.Siffredi, Alejandra. "Algunos personajes de la mitología tehuelche meridional." RUNA: Archivo para las Ciencias del Hombre 11 (1968-69): 123-131. (secondary)
Sources
- Máip is the maleficent spirit of darkness, shadow, cold and wind in southern Tehuelche belief—'the murderous wind'—feared as bringer of bad luck and death and opposed to the culture-hero Elal.: Siffredi, Alejandra. "Algunos personajes de la mitología tehuelche meridional." RUNA: Archivo para las Ciencias del Hombre 11 (1968-69): 123-131. (secondary); "Tehuelche Religion." Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2005 (Encyclopedia.com). (secondary)