Pelom and the Milky Way in the Mapuche worldview

Abstract

This essay intends to introduce a description of the Chilean Mapuche view concerning the components of the galaxy known as the Milky Way. This broad luminous band that stretches across the night sky together with the solar system has always been noticed by the Mapuche whose language known as Mapudungun has recorded many of these terms since the XVI century. The corpus studied here includes a list of terms first collected by Father Luis de Valdivia  in 1606, the terms further elicited by other researchers and, finally, a brief lexical-semantic analysis  of the data containing utterances which are still in force mainly among the old  native speakers of  Mapudungun.

Keywords: light, Milky Way, astral constellations.