Chichiní

Chichiní, the Sun, stands at the head of the traditional Totonac pantheon as documented by Alain Ichon among the Sierra Totonac of Puebla in the 1960s. Creation narratives recorded in the Sierra Norte de Puebla relate that a poor boy threw himself into a great fire and rose into the sky as the Sun, while his hesitant brother became the Moon; the Sun thereafter rules the day and the ordered, life-giving side of the cosmos, assisted in the east and south, which the Totonac associate with his birth and vitality. In the colonial and modern period the Sun was syncretically identified with Jesus Christ, and he was believed to require regular offerings of incense and devotion to sustain his vital force. Ichon records that the Sun is regarded as the son of the divine mother Natsi'itni.

Parentage

• Natsi'itni

Domains

• sun
• life giving light

Powers

• to give light, warmth, and life to the world by day

Relations

• sibling: Papa

Sources

• Ichon, Alain. La religión de los totonacas de la sierra. México: Instituto Nacional Indigenista / Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1973.
• Beaucage, Pierre, and Xóchitl Rojas Mora. 'Cosmologías nahua (maseual) y totonaca (tutunakú) de la Sierra Norte de Puebla (México). Primera parte: el tiempo de la creación.' Anales de Antropología 55, no. 2 (2021): 143-159.
• Harvey, H. R., and Isabel Kelly. 'The Totonac.' In Handbook of Middle American Indians, vol. 8, Ethnology, Part Two, edited by Evon Z. Vogt. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969.