Renaico River: Mythology and Cosmovision
by Hans Ross
The Renaico River is a place where many tales are told. These stories usually come from the area’s inhabitants and fishermen, who turn their life experiences into myths and legends.
Punalka
The ngen, or spirits of the Mapuche cosmovision, inhabit the Renaico River. One of these spirits is the Punalka, or “river animal,” who owns and protects the river. The Punalka takes on different forms, like a big fish or a horse. This mythological animal inhabits the entire Renaico river basin. Many fishermen say that they’ve run into a giant fish—possibly the physical manifestation of the Punalka—as they’ve traveled along the river.
Huinmalén
The people of Renaico know this story well, of a little girl in a white dress who combs her blond hair over and over, as if she were watching herself in a mirror. Sometimes she appears in the middle of the river; other times she appears on a rock, or on the riverbanks. Her presence is a bad omen, though she can also appear in the middle of a cloud following a catastrophe. Mapuche communities all along the Renaico River know about her. They say that she, too, is a ngen that inhabits the river, and that when she disappears, she turns into a fish and swims away.
Ngen-ko
The ngen-ko are river spirits that can turn into animals, people, rocks, or even tree trunks. Indeed, they can take on animal, human, or plant forms. When they take on animal forms, they appear as cows, calves, horses, sheep, pigs, or dogs, though they can also be frogs, or even mermaids—which the Mapuche call sumpall. They can also take the form of an eternally young human couple: a man and woman who play together in the water. They take on different colors: blue like the water, white like marine foam, or green like algae, scrub brush, or the deep, dark waters where they live. The ngen-ko have different names depending on which waters they inhabit at any given time.
The “living hide”
The myth of living hides—the skins of animals that have been cast into the river—can be found throughout Chile. They say that these hides take on new life in the water, and trap everything that goes by them, including fish and birds. They can attach themselves to fishing boats, though they have no definitive form. Rather, they look like a mass of skin and hair that travels with the current.