“The sacred ceremony where the Mapuche people gather to ask Ngenechen, the creator, for protection and abundance. The ceremony is a direct line to the sacred.”
Mapudungun is the language of the Mapuche people of southern Chile and Argentina. Nguillatun is built from nguilla, meaning 'to ask' or 'to pray,' and -tun, a suffix indicating an action or state. So nguillatun literally means 'asking' or 'praying.' The ceremony is direct address to Ngenechen, the creator deity, the force that holds the cosmos together. The Mapuche do not pray in the Christian sense — to ask for forgiveness or salvation. They pray to ask for protection, for good harvests, for health, for the wellbeing of the community.
The nguillatun is held in spring (October in the Southern Hemisphere) and lasts two to three days. Families from the same lof — a Mapuche territorial community — gather in a sacred space. They bring animals for ritual sacrifice. They bring food. They gather in a circle around a sacred tree, the rewe, with a cross carved into it. The ceremony follows strict order: songs, dances, the sacrifice of an animal (usually a lamb), and prayers. The machi — the Mapuche healer and spiritual leader, usually a woman — leads the ceremony.
The structure of the nguillatun mirrors Mapuche cosmology. Everything is connected. The living and the dead. The visible and the invisible. The ceremony is the place where these worlds touch. When the animal is sacrificed, its blood feeds both the earth and the invisible realm. The prayers spoken are heard by Ngenechen. The dancing is a form of prayer — the body speaking to the creator when words aren't enough.
The nguillatun is illegal in Chile and Argentina. Or rather, it's legally tolerated as a 'religious practice' but constantly threatened. Chilean and Argentine governments have historically worked to suppress it, to force assimilation, to convert Mapuche people to Christianity. Yet the nguillatun persists. Communities keep the ceremony alive in small spaces, on small plots of land, with fewer families each year. But it persists. The asking continues.
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Today
The nguillatun is an act of persistence. Every ceremony is a refusal to disappear. The Mapuche have survived conquest, colonization, and a century of state oppression. Their land has been reduced. Their language is dying in the young. But the nguillatun continues. Families gather. They ask Ngenechen. They sacrifice. They dance. They remember that they are Mapuche.
The ceremony is asking. That's what the word means. But asking in the face of a state that says you should not exist is not just prayer. It's resistance. It's the assertion that the Mapuche have a right to speak to their creator, on their land, in their way. The asking is the defiance.
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