Among the Mapuche people of southern Chile and adjacent Argentina, spiritual authority has never been confined to a male/female binary — a tradition at the center of Mapuche Machi third gender identity. The Machi, the Mapuche’s central spiritual and religious authorities, are recognized as holding a distinct gender defined by calling and spiritual identity rather than by the sex they were assigned at birth.
Mapuche Machi Third Gender Roles Rest on Balance, Not Binary
The Mapuche worldview is built around dualism: sky and earth, good and evil, masculine and feminine, held in constant balance rather than opposition. The Machi’s role is to maintain that balance for the community, and their gender identity reflects the same principle — understood as something the role itself confers, not something fixed in advance by biology. As the Natural History Museum’s own coverage of the tradition puts it, the gender binary familiar to many Western societies “is far from a universal concept,” and Mapuche cosmology is a clear example of why.
The Trapelacucha: A Symbol Worn Into the Present
Machi continue to wear the trapelacucha, a silver pendant historically crafted from repurposed Spanish coins, as a visible marker of their role. Its design is built from equilateral crosses, a direct symbolic reference to the duality at the heart of Mapuche philosophy. Beyond its symbolism, Machi have historically understood silver itself as protective — a material believed to guard against evil spirits, which is part of why the ornament remains central to Machi dress today rather than becoming a purely historical artifact.
Scholars and Mapuche Voices Documenting the Tradition
Anthropologist Ana Mariella Bacigalupo has written extensively on Machi gender and spiritual practice, while Mapuche linguists María Catrileo and Gloria Quidel have contributed language-grounded perspective on how these concepts are understood from within the culture itself, rather than translated loosely into Western frameworks. Contemporary Machi such as Jorge Quilaqueo continue the practice today, and the tradition has also intersected with modern Mapuche politics — Machi Celestino Córdova’s case as a political prisoner is one example of how the role carries weight well beyond ceremony.
Chile’s Largest Indigenous Nation
The Mapuche remain Chile’s largest Indigenous community, which makes Machi tradition far from a marginal or historical curiosity — it’s an active, living spiritual practice within one of South America’s largest and most politically visible Indigenous populations.
Why This Matters for the Shamanic Community
The Machi tradition is a clear, well-documented example of something many shamanic and animist traditions around the world share: spiritual authority and gender fluidity have long coexisted outside a strict binary, well before the idea was part of mainstream Western conversation. For Shaman Portal’s audience, the Machi offer a concrete, specific case study — not an abstract theory — of how a living tradition defines spiritual calling on its own terms.
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