Adkintuwe

Adkintuwe is a branch-based communication system in Lonko Kilapan’s account of Araucanian history, created to carry messages after the Spanish could disrupt telepathic communication by killing those who possessed it. Its workings are never made fully clear: the book identifies messages sent through moving branches, while Oscar Amalfitano’s reading pauses over what that description could mean. The system thus stands both as a practical answer to surveillance and as one of the narrative’s most conspicuously uncertain claims.

Description and Purpose

In the passage Amalfitano reads, the Araucanians have two communication channels from Santiago: telepathy and Adkintuwe. Lautaro, said to have notable telepathic abilities, is taken north with his mother while still a child to serve the Spaniards, and later contributes to their defeat. The account then gives the system its defensive rationale: telepaths could be eliminated and communications cut, so Adkintuwe was created as another means of transmitting information.

Kilapan’s history says the Spaniards became aware of Adkintuwe only after 1700. Although they discovered it, they could not decipher it; they instead attributed the Araucanians’ knowledge of events in Concepcion to traffic with the devil. The narrative maps three lines of communication from the capital: one along the Andes’ foothills, one along the coast, and one through the central valley. These details make the system appear at once geographically organized and resistant to the power that has discovered it.

An Uncertain Mechanism

The account’s concrete explanation is that messages were sent by the movement of branches. Yet Amalfitano’s close reading emphasizes that the nature of this method is not clear. He considers whether branches placed at strategic points, perhaps on hilltops, might have carried signals, and compares the possibility to smoke signals used by the Plains Indians. These are questions raised by the text, not a confirmed technical description of how Adkintuwe operated.

The footnote repeats that the Spaniards eventually learned of the system’s existence but never deciphered it. That repetition does not resolve the uncertainty; it reinforces the gap between knowledge that a communication network exists and knowledge of what its signs mean. Adkintuwe is therefore presented as a method whose reported purpose is intelligible while its actual code remains inaccessible.

Relation to Telepathy and Writing

Kilapan’s account places Adkintuwe alongside a broader set of claims about Araucanian communication. It says primitive people communicated by brainwaves, like animals and plants, and that reliance on sounds, gestures, and hand signals diminished the gift of telepathy; life in cities accelerated the loss by separating people from nature. The account also attributes two forms of writing to the Araucanians: knot-writing called Prom and secret triangle-writing called Adentunemul. Adkintuwe is not described as either form of writing, but as a communication method maintained alongside them.

The narrative further claims that telepathy allowed Araucanians to remain in permanent contact with Chilean migrants scattered as far away as India, ancient Germania, and the Peloponnese. Amalfitano’s reading treats this expansive history as evidence of Kilapan’s far-reaching and extravagant claims, even entertaining the conclusion that both Bernardo O’Higgins and Kilapan himself were telepaths. In that context, Adkintuwe is one element in a system of communications that stretches from local branch signals to imagined transcontinental contact.

Amalfitano’s Reading and the System’s Significance

Amalfitano does not present Kilapan’s claims as settled historical fact. He examines the book’s assertions and footnotes, draws out their implications, and marks the places where the proposed mechanism remains opaque. His reading makes the system’s ambiguity central: Adkintuwe is described as having been discovered but not deciphered, and even the reader is left to speculate about how its signals worked.

That uncertainty also sharpens the passage’s contrast between communication and control. In Kilapan’s account, telepathy is vulnerable because its practitioners can be killed, while Adkintuwe survives as an alternative the Spaniards cannot interpret. The system’s narrative force lies in that unresolved possibility: the branch movement may be an intelligible code, an assertion within Kilapan’s expansive history, or both, but the passage withholds the certainty that would make it transparent.