Araucanian telepathy

Araucanian telepathy is a power of direct mental communication attributed to the Araucanians in Lonko Kilapan’s book O’Higgins Is Araucanian. As Oscar Amalfitano reads the book, telepathy becomes both a means of resisting Spanish conquest and a device that connects Chilean Indigenous history to distant peoples and places. The narrative neither establishes the claims as fact nor treats them as a simple joke: it makes their audacity, their historical setting, and Amalfitano’s response part of the subject.

Kilapan’s account of communication

Kilapan’s second proof, titled “He was born to an Araucanian -woman,” begins by claiming that, upon the Spaniards’ arrival, the Araucanians established two means of communication from Santiago: telepathy and Adkintuwe. The account associates telepathy with Lautaro, who was taken north with his mother while still a child and entered Spanish service; his mental abilities supposedly later helped defeat the Spaniards. The narrative presents this extraordinary claim as part of a constructed history of resistance, in which knowledge and communication are strategic resources.

Because telepaths could be eliminated and their communications severed, Kilapan’s account says, the Araucanians developed Adkintuwe as another channel. The Spaniards eventually noticed that messages were being sent through movements of branches, but, according to Kilapan, never deciphered the system. The two methods therefore occupy different positions in the account: telepathy is an unseen capacity, while Adkintuwe leaves visible signs that outsiders can observe without understanding.

A theory of lost human capacity

Kilapan extends the claim beyond a small group of exceptional individuals. His book proposes that primitive people communicated by brainwaves, like animals and plants, before sounds, gestures, and hand signals began to replace that ability. Settlement in cities, which separated people from nature, supposedly accelerated telepathy’s decline. The theory makes the power not merely an inherited Araucanian gift but a lost human capacity, with urban life and distance from the natural world cast as conditions of its disappearance.

Telepathy also sits alongside, rather than replacing, forms of writing. Kilapan attributes two writing systems to the Araucanians: Prom, described as rope-knotting, and Adentunemul, a secret system based on triangles. He further claims that certain Kügas, whose families were dispersed across the Americas, the Pacific Islands, and the far south, specialized in telepathic communication so that enemies could not surprise them. In this scheme, mental contact sustains long-distance connection where ordinary messages might be intercepted.

A speculative global history

The book enlarges that network into a sweeping migration story. Kilapan claims that telepathy kept Araucanians in permanent contact with Chilean migrants who had settled first in India, then in ancient Germania, and later in the Peloponnese, before returning to Chile by way of India and the Pacific. The proposed route joins Araucanian history to several distant regions and turns telepathy into the means by which a dispersed people could remain connected across continents and generations.

Amalfitano’s reading registers the scale of these assertions without smoothing over their contradictions or uncertainties. He concludes that Kilapan’s account implies that most Araucanians were telepathic, that Araucanian language was closely linked to Homer’s, that Araucanians had traveled widely and were remarkable sailors, and that they possessed two kinds of writing. But the precise operation of Adkintuwe remains unclear even within the book: Amalfitano considers whether it might involve messages sent through branches placed at strategic points. By contrast, telepathy is represented as a channel the Spaniards never discovered; its eventual failure is attributed to their killing the telepaths.

Amalfitano’s reading and the book’s historical setting

The passage appears after Amalfitano returns home and reconsiders the voice he has been hearing. He recalls the short book, published in Santiago in 1978, which an old friend had sent him while he was living in Europe. Kilapan identifies himself as Historian of the Race, President of the Indigenous Confederation of Chile, and Secretary of the Academy of the Araucanian Language. That institutional self-presentation gives the extravagant claims a deliberately formal frame, even as Amalfitano recognizes how far they exceed ordinary historical proof.

Amalfitano also places the book’s publication within Chile’s military dictatorship. He imagines the atmosphere of triumph, loneliness, and fear around its production, and pictures Kilapan bargaining with the printer at Editorial Universitaria on Calle San Francisco in Santiago. The scene draws attention to the material labor and limited resources behind the text: Kilapan seeks a discount and promises other manuscripts, including works on Araucanian and Greek legends and on links among Araucanians, Aryans, early Germans, and Greeks. The printer is persuaded by the prospect of a book bearing the distinction of the press. Amalfitano’s response culminates in breathless laughter. The episode leaves telepathy suspended between Indigenous counter-history, imaginative speculation, and the precarious act of making a book under dictatorship.