Setebos

Setebos (also Settaboth) was a deity of the Tehuelche people of eastern Patagonia. The name was recorded by Europeans traveling with Ferdinand Magellan during the first circumnavigation of the world (1519–1522), and again some 58 years later by Sir Francis Drake during his (1577–1579) circumnavigation voyage. The Tehuelche language is recently extinct; since the name Setebos is not attested in more recent ethnographic studies of eastern Patagonian indigenous peoples, the reports made during the 16th century appear to be the only documented evidence of a god having this name. However, the name Setebos occurs twice in Shakespeare's 1611 play The Tempest, and scholars generally agree that Shakespeare adopted the name after having read a sixteenth-century English account of Magellan's voyage. In the play, Setebos, an unseen character, is described as the god worshiped by the sea-witch Sycorax, the mother of the subhuman Caliban. Many Shakespearean scholars have explicitly connected the character of Setebos in The Tempest with the characteristics attributed by the Tehuelche people to their god Setebos. Largely because of Shakespeare's use of the name, "Setebos" has maintained currency in published works, including poems, novels and plays. In some of these (e.g.…

Setebos (also Settaboth) was a deity of the Tehuelche people of eastern Patagonia. The name was recorded by Europeans traveling with Ferdinand Magellan during the first circumnavigation of the world (1519–1522), and again some 58 years later by Sir Francis Drake during his (1577–1579) circumnavigation voyage. The Tehuelche language is recently extinct; since the name Setebos is not attested in more recent ethnographic studies of eastern Patagonian indigenous peoples, the reports made during the 16th century appear to be the only documented evidence of a god having this name. However, the name Setebos occurs twice in Shakespeare's 1611 play The Tempest, and scholars generally agree that Shakespeare adopted the name after having read a sixteenth-century English account of Magellan's voyage. In the play, Setebos, an unseen character, is described as the god worshiped by the sea-witch Sycorax, the mother of the subhuman Caliban. Many Shakespearean scholars have explicitly connected the character of Setebos in The Tempest with the characteristics attributed by the Tehuelche people to their god Setebos. Largely because of Shakespeare's use of the name, "Setebos" has maintained currency in published works, including poems, novels and plays. In some of these (e.g. Robert Browning's Caliban upon Setebos) Setebos is understood to be the mythical character mentioned in The Tempest, while in others (e.g. Mónica Maffía's Cimbelino en la Patagonia ) Setebos is presented both as a Shakespearean character and as the Tehuelche god. Setebos's physical appearance is described only briefly in the 16th century accounts, and not at all in The Tempest, and in subsequent works, Setebos has been imagined in a variety of different ways, ranging from nearly human, to a tiger-toad chimera, to a bizarre extraterrestrial creature. ====Caliban Upon Setebos==== Robert Browning's poem, published in 1864¹, has as second title "Natural Theology in the Island". J. Cotter Morison gave what is now a standard interpretation of Browning's title: "the writer's intention ... is to describe in a dramatic monologue the Natural Theology, that is, the conception of God, likely, or rather certain to occur to such a being as Caliban." Caliban's god is, of course, Setebos, and the poem can be seen as an analysis of the thought processes of Caliban as he tries to understand the nature of his god. Browning uses Caliban (or so it is widely argued) to demonstrate the errors of constructing God in the image of ourselves, and perhaps also as a rhetorical vehicle to attack established religions, in particular, Calvinism. Shakespeare's Caliban is a primitive version of a man, and Caliban conceives of his god as a primitive man might, based on his experience with the natural world. Much of the poem is concerned with Caliban's fantasy of himself as a god, and the analogies he draws between his own imagined behavior and that of Setebos. Caliban imagines, for instance, crabs walking from the mountains to the sea, and says he will Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first, Loving not, hating not, just choosing so. He concludes "As it likes me each time, I do: so He" [i.e. Setebos]. Caliban reasons that Setebos is a being who derives vicarious satisfaction from creating creatures who (unlike Setebos) are capable of physical reproduction, and then expresses his jealously by committing capricious acts of spite and vengeance on those creatures. Setebos inspires fear and loathing in Caliban with few consolations: Caliban anticipates no afterlife nor is he optimistic about relief from suffering in this one. Although he imagines a second god above Setebos, which he calls "The Quiet", Caliban can't imagine either of these gods as working in his favor. Setebos, Caliban imagines, "Looks up, first, and perceives he cannot soar / To what is quiet and hath happy life; / Next looks down here, and out of very spite / Makes this a bauble-world to ape yon real". Browning twice mentions, as a physical attribute of Setebos, his multiple hands: 'Careth but for Setebos The many-handed as a cuttle-fish, and Also it pleaseth Setebos to work, Use all His hands, and exercise much craft, By no means for the love of what is worked. although it is possible that Caliban is meant to be speaking metaphorically here. ====Caliban by the Yellow Sands==== To commemorate the 300th anniversary of Shakespeare's death in 1916, New York City commissioned Percy MacKaye to create a theatrical experience for the community based on Shakespeare's work. The result, Caliban by the Yellow Sands, required about 30 professional actors for the speaking roles and about 2500 mute participants for the pantomimes. MacKaye described the opening scene: The scene is the cave of SETEBOS, whose stark-colored idol — half tiger and half toad — colossal and primitive — rises at centre above a stone altar. On the right, the cave leads inward to the abode of SYCORAX; on the left, it leads outward to the sea, a blue-green glimpse of which is vaguely visible. High in the tiger-jaws of the idol, ARIEL — a slim, winged figure, half nude — is held fettered. Miranda discovers the imprisoned Ariel; Prospero releases Ariel and his spirits, and together with Prospero they convert Setebos's cave into a theater and perform a pageant consisting of scenes from Shakespeare. The dramatic tension consists of a struggle for Caliban's soul, between the forces of darkness, represented by Setebos and his "priests" Lust, War and Death, and the forces of light, i.e. Prospero, Ariel and Miranda. Judging from the program of the second (Boston) set of performances in 1917, as well as other contemporary accounts, the role of Setebos was not a speaking one and Setebos was not portrayed via an actor. Rather, the "middle stage" (where the characters of The Tempest interacted) was dominated by a two-headed idol, "half tiger, half toad," representing Setebos. The frontispiece of MacKaye's Program, shown here in Figure 2, displays an image of Setebos created by Joseph Urban for the New York performances; the caption is "The Cave of Setebos." ====Cimbelino en la Patagonia==== Mónica Maffía's play was written for a 2022 performance by her Buenos Aires based theater company, Setebos. It is described as "an eco-drama based on Shakespeare's Cymbeline, set within the Tehuelche myth of the god/hero Setebos." The play was commissioned in connection with the Cymbeline in the Anthropocene project, described as "an international research-in-performance project which brings together seven theatre companies and environmentally committed productions from four continents." The play was performed as part of the "Cymbeline in the Anthropocene" Festival. In a 2022 interview with the CBC, Maffía said there’s a connexion through Caliban, which is where this adaptation of Cymbeline comes from for me, because Caliban prays to his god, which is Setebos. Researching who Setebos was, I found that [out] in Pigafetta’s chronicles of Magellan and the first [circum]navigation; and through those chronicles we learn that when [the Spanish] met the Tehuelches, [the latter] were very tall. And that in their funeral rites, they said that Setebos appeared, and with smaller “devils.” So Setebos is both a hero and a god-devil figure. In a separate interview in 2022, Maffía elaborated: Setebos, she said, was also the father of people who were the ancestral people of Patagonia who were Tehuelche, and in their tradition, animals are people. We know about that god, not usually through a connection with our myths, but through Shakespeare ... None of those who were my group of actors knew even the name Setebos. They immediately got philosophical about it. They turned down their voices and their souls began to speak. So I thought that’s an opportunity for me as a director and as a playwright to get people to know about these folktales that were traditional before Shakespeare. The action begins with actors arriving at a cabaña in El Chaltén, a small mountain village in Santa Cruz Province, Argentina that is supposedly the birthplace of the Tehuelche fire-god Setebos, creator of the region's people and wildlife. The actors gradually fall under the spell of the mountain. As the play progresses, each actor plays characters representing three states of being: contemporary Argentinian, Shakespearian, and Tehuelche human-animal. The lines between these states become blurred, until finally the characters metamorphose into avatars of the Setebos myth. Unlike in Shakespeare's play, the actors repeatedly invoke Setebos by name; for instance, the character Ínogen's touching “¡Setebos, me encomiendo a tu protección!” / “Setebos, I commend myself to your protection” before she goes to sleep. Near the end of the play, the story of the birth of Setebos and the Tehuelche people is presented by the spiritually reborn actors wearing animal masks. ====Ilium/Olympos==== An extraterrestrial creature called Setebos plays an important role in Dan Simmons' science-fiction novels Ilium and Olympos. The two novels, which comprise a series, also contain characters named Prospero, Ariel and Caliban who are clearly based on the eponymous characters in The Tempest, and there is little doubt that the author patterned his Setebos after the god mentioned in that play as well. Simmons's Setebos also calls to mind Browning's description in his Caliban upon Setebos in that Simmons describes Setebos as having myriad arms; however unlike Browning's Setebos, who is infertile, Simmons's character is highly fecund. Simmons gives the following description of Setebos, as seen through the eyes of a human named Daeman. The creature sits over a crater at the center of a blue, ice-cold dome: This raised crater looked very much like a nest and the impression was reinforced by the thing that filled it gray brain tissue, convoluted ridges, multiple pairs of eyes, mouths, and orifices opening and shutting in no unison, a score of huge hands beneath it these hands occasionally rearranging the huge form's mass on its nest, settling it more comfortably and he saw other hands, each larger than the room Daeman occuped at Ardis Hall, that had emerged from the brain on stalks and were pulling themselves and their trailing tentacles across the glowing floor. Daeman counts several dozen eggs around Setebos. He steals one; it eventually hatches, into a miniature, and very malevolent, version of its parent. ==References==

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