Gos

Gos are the spirits of the Vilela, a hunting and gathering people of the Gran Chaco in what is now north-western Argentina. In the fifteenth century the Vilela lived in northern Tucumán and Santiago del Estero and eastern Salta, living on peccary, carob and honey.

After the Spanish conquest of Tucumán they moved east into the Chaco, and later the horse-riding Guaycuru pushed them still nearer the Paraná. Jesuits gathered the Vilela into missions from the 1730s until the order's expulsion in 1767.

In Vilela mythology the gos were the owners of nature. They could harm people, and Jesuit missionaries therefore called them devils, but they could also heal. Traditionally the Vilela shamans cured the sick by invoking the gos in songs whose power made them guarded knowledge.