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 people no longer constitute a coherent community and their language appears to be 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.