What happened
From the 18th century, a secret organization of warlocks known as “La Mayoría” or the “Tribunal of the Indigenous Race” was said to operate on the Chiloé Archipelago in southern Chile. It called its territory the Recta Provincia – the “Righteous Province.” Tradition dates its beginnings to 1786, when the Spanish cartographer José de Moraleda lost a magic contest to the machi (shaman) Chillpila of Quetalco, who left his ship stranded on dry land, and gave her a book of magic in return. The brotherhood had a king and seven districts with code names taken from places in the Spanish empire – Buenos Aires, Lima, Salamanca, Santiago. The king's seat was the hidden Cave of Quicaví, guarded by the Invunche, a deformed human monster. The organization judged accusations of witchcraft and disputes between neighbors. In 1880 Chiloé's governor, Martiniano Rodríguez, brought charges against it for illegal association. Many defendants were questioned at the court in Ancud; the highest-ranking, Mateo Coñuecar, described an underground chamber entered through a trapdoor in the roof and locked with a brass key, where the “Book of Art” was kept.
Witnesses
The records of the trial before the Ancud court (1880), published by Prudencio Barrientos in 1908 (“Los Brujos de Chiloé. Célebre proceso del Juzgado de Ancud”); the defendants' testimony, including that of Mateo Coñuecar.
Explanations and hypotheses
The historian Gonzalo Rojas Flores has shown that the Mayoría may have worked as a parallel authority in places where the Chilean state was still weak – settling disputes and witchcraft accusations among the islands' Indigenous people. The 1880 trial coincided with the state tightening its grip on Chiloé and was a way of breaking up this structure. Some confessions were extracted under torture, so it is hard to separate the real organization from what the investigators wanted to hear. The Moraleda story is a legend: his report does not mention Chillpila. After the trial the brotherhood fell apart, but beliefs in the brujos of Chiloé, the Invunche and the Caleuche survive to this day.
Disputed A likely explanation exists, but some of the facts are still disputed.
Sources
- Gonzalo Rojas Flores, Reyes sobre la tierra: brujería y chamanismo en una cultura insular (Memoria Chilena)
- Prudencio Barrientos, Los Brujos de Chiloé. Célebre proceso del Juzgado de Ancud (Santiago, 1908)
- Diccionario de la brujería en Chiloé