Tokwaj
Wichí · deity · Wichí traditional religion; continuing · Recorded classification
Tokwaj (also Tokhwáh, Tawkxwax, Tokjuaj) is the central figure of Wichí narrative, a trickster and culture-hero whose adventures form an extended cycle that Chaco ethnographers have grouped into the deceived-trickster, the liberation of the waters, and Tokwaj-the-shaper. He is at once creative and destructive: he frees the waters held in the great palo borracho tree, brings fire and honey to humankind, and fixes the rhythm of the seasons, yet his appetite and cunning constantly rebound on him in comic catastrophe. Though supernaturally powerful, he is conceived as profoundly human rather than as a remote high god, and his deeds are felt to have given the Chaco its present shape.
Domains
- trickster culture hero
- release of the waters
- fire and seasons
Powers
- to release the world's water from the tree that contained it
- to change his own shape and trick other beings
Epithets
- Tío TraviesoJan-Åke Alvarsson, The Mataco of the Gran Chaco: An Ethnographic Account of Change and Continuity in Mataco Socio-Economic Organization, Uppsala Studies in Cultural Anthropology 11, Almqvist & Wiksell, Uppsala, 1988. (secondary)
Relations
- companion: The SunTokwaj appears alongside the Sun in the cycle of Woodpecker and the Daughter of the Sun, the two figures sharing the same body of solar myths recorded by Métraux.Alfred Métraux, Myths and Tales of the Matako Indians (The Gran Chaco, Argentina), Etnologiska Studier 9, Göteborg, 1939. (secondary)
- enemy: Lawo', the Rainbow Water-SerpentTokwaj loosens and steals away the waters that the rainbow-serpent Lawo' guards, setting the trickster against the master of storm and flood.Alfred Métraux, Ethnography of the Chaco, in Handbook of South American Indians, vol. 1, ed. Julian H. Steward, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 143, Washington, 1946. (secondary)
Sources
- Tokwaj is the ambivalent trickster and culture-hero of the Wichí, whose myth cycle accounts for the release of water, the gift of fire and the ordering of the world amid recurrent disorder.: Alfred Métraux, Myths and Tales of the Matako Indians (The Gran Chaco, Argentina), Etnologiska Studier 9, Göteborg, 1939. (secondary); Johannes Wilbert & Karin Simoneau (eds.), Folk Literature of the Mataco Indians, UCLA Latin American Center Publications, Los Angeles, 1982. (secondary); Jan-Åke Alvarsson, The Mataco of the Gran Chaco, Uppsala Studies in Cultural Anthropology 11, Almqvist & Wiksell, Uppsala, 1988. (secondary)