These strange, quasi-humanoid beasts, which hail from the bowels of Chili’s magma ridden volcanoes, are known for their taste for human flesh and have allegedly been the recipients of hundreds of virgin sacrifices.
The coastal, South American nation of Chili is said to play host to a gigantic, anthropophagous life form known as the Cherufe. Said to thrive in the magma rich pools found deep within Chilean volcanoes, this UNCLASSIFIED creature is said to be made of living rock and magma and is purported to be the source of numerous earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
It was reported by the indigenous peoples of the area that the only way to abate the Cherufe’s appetite for destruction, was to satiate the beast’s taste for human flesh by throwing a sacrificial victim into the bowels of its volcanic home. Much like the European DRAGON — which some accounts claim it resembles — the Cherufe’s preferred delicacy came in the form of virginal maidens.
Legend has it that once the Cherufe was finished consuming the more delicate portions of its victims, it would delight in a macabre game in which it would ignite the disembodied heads of the young girls who were sacrificed to it, and hurtle them from the mouth of its volcanic home, where it would roll down the rocky slope and land at the feet of the mortified mourners.
According to South American Mythology, the Cherufe was immobilized by the daughters of the sun god, who utilized magical swords, which were capable of freezing the creature.
While it is easy to trace the mythological origins of this beast to a prehistoric need to explain anomalous geological events such as volcanic eruptions — and just as easy to dismiss these claims as the product of myth and folklore — there has been some consideration given by cryptozoological investigators to the possibility that Cherufe may represent an actual biological entity.
While there’s virtually no probability that the Cherufe is made of living rock, there is an admittedly slim chance that these creatures — much like the strange animals who thrive in the tremendous heat found in the mineral rich exhaust of hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor — maybe a unique and potentially intelligent extremophile organism, which is capable not only of surviving, but flourishing, in the incredible heat and molten rock that lies in the churning bowls of the Earth.
© Copyright Rob Morphy 2002 — 2011
