The cultrún (Mapudungun: kultrung) is the most important musical instrument in Mapuche culture — a ceremonial drum used by the machi, the community’s healer and ritual leader, rather than a folk or dance instrument in the usual sense. It’s built from a single hollowed log of canelo, laurel, or lingue wood, cut in winter to keep it from splitting, with a head of horsehide or lambskin stretched and tied over the hollowed bowl. It’s played either held in one hand and struck with a single stick, or rested on the ground and struck with two.

The cultrún’s design carries deep cosmological weight in Mapuche belief: its rounded shape represents half of the universe, and the symbols painted on its head map the Mapuche cosmos. Objects placed inside the drum’s body — stones, herbs, coins, animal hair — are chosen in even numbers and carry their own symbolic meaning tied to fertility and the natural world. Traditionally played by women and non-binary people rather than men, the cultrún remains central to the Ngillatun, the Mapuche people’s annual rite of thanksgiving and supplication, and has more recently become a visible presence in Chilean public protest movements as well.