Máip
Tehuelche · deity · Tehuelche traditional religion; continuing · deity
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
- Máip
Relations
- enemy: Elal