ALWE: Human Spectrum

Alwe: "first soul," "animal soul," the animistic base of the "second soul" (am), a subtle vital energy, a kind of biological substrate of the psychological self. The term - as well as am - has been subjected to various translation attempts, all insufficient and partial, only describing peripheral and analogous aspects of the true content of this complex concept. Linguists, chroniclers, and ethnographers agree at least on two aspects:

a) It is a type of "anima" closely linked to the corpse (it never strays far from it). When the corpse completely decomposes, the alwe also disappears, leaving no trace.

b) It is a vital fluid that can be trapped, extracted (sucked out), and manipulated from a distance by the "art" of the sorcerer (jkalku). For example, the witranalwe is a category of zombie, a creature created by expert sorcerers using a certain bone from a deceased person and a specific type of skin (from the soles of the feet and the palms of the hands). This fluid, which emanates immediately after death, was "hooked" (witran) onto these elements, giving it a pseudo-human form or appearance. Sometimes, this fluid could also be captured from a sick person.

The early chronicler and first grammarian of the Mapuche language, Jesuit Luis de Valdivia (1606), states that alwe also meant "fever," reinforcing the notion that it indeed refers to the "spectrum energy," the final exudation of the vital impulse, expelled at the moment of the functional death of the subject, energy that recondenses for a determined period outside the body. Data collected by another specialist (Latcham), insist that "the living body did not have alwe, it only appeared when death occurred."

Another Jesuit and linguist, B. Havestadt (1777), contributes another valuable element. He asserts that it is the term used to designate the "dead," but specifically those "whose death has been mourned," (moritur, cum morte luctator). This implies that weeping could be a means to retain the magnetic fluid of human animality, a fluid that tends to reincorporate itself, stimulated or compelled by the emotional passion of tears. Consequently, alwe would be the dead itself, the "magnetic shell," the dead insofar as retained in its biological energy, scattered and erratic. Alwe would be the dead as a hostage to the whims of an external will, the tears of relatives, or the own repetitive passions, cultivated in life by the deceased.

Finally, the etymology of the word complements, confirms, and nuances the previous assertions from ethnographic chroniclers and traditional observations. Alwe is directly related to the term alün, "great vehemence," which, transformed into the adverb that seems to be almost semantically overlapping with alwe, conveys the sense of "little by little," "moderately," "not very." From here, we get another eloquent approximation of alwe: an unstable fluid that degrades gradually, obeys the regime of passion, and can be susceptible to being manipulated from a distance.