who I am.' The man repairing to the said physician, tells him what he has seen. The wizard, or conjurer, runs immediately to see the tree the other has told him of, sits down by it and makes it cogioba [an offering of tobacco].... He stands up, gives it all its titles, as if it were some great lord, and asks of it, 'Tell me who you are, what you do here, what you will have with me, and why you send for me? Tell me whether you will have me cut you, whether you will go along with me, and how you will have me carry you; and I will build you a house and endow it.' Immediately that tree, or cemi, becomes an idol, or devil, answers, telling how he will have him do it. He cuts it into such a shape as he is directed, builds his house, and endows it; and makes cogioba for it several times in the year, which cogioba is to pray to it, to please it, to ask and know of the said cemi what good or evil is to happen, and to beg wealth of it."
In such descriptions we get our picture of zemiism, a religion rising above the animism which was its obvious source, becoming predominantly anthropomorphic in its representations of superhuman beings, yet showing no signs of passing from crude fetish-worship to that symbolic use of images which marks the higher forms of idolatry. The ritual was apparently not bloody—offerings of tobacco, the use of purges and narcotics inducing vision and frenzy, and the dramatic dances, or areitos, which marked all solemn occasions and the great seasons of life, such as birth and marriage and death—these were the important features. Oblatio sacrificiorum pertinet ad jus naturale, says Las Casas (quoting St. Thomas Aquinas) in his description of Haitian rites; and to the law of man's nature may surely be ascribed that impulse which caused the Antillean to make his offerings to Heaven and Earth and to the powers that dwell therein.
Nor was he forgetful of the potencies within himself. With his nature-worship was a closely associated ancestor-worship. When they can no longer see the reflection of a person in the pupil of the eye, the soul is fled, say the Arawak—fled to become a zemi. The early writers all dwell upon this belief in the potency and propinquity of the souls of the departed. They are shut up by day, but walk abroad by night, says Fray Ramon; and sometimes they return to their kinsmen in the form of Incubi: "thus it is they know them: they feel their belly, and if they cannot find their navel, they say they are dead; for they say the dead have no navel." The navel is the symbol of birth and of the attachment of the body to its life; hence the dead, though they may possess all other bodily members, lack this; and the Indians have, says Pane, one name for the soul in the living body and another for the soul of the departed.
The bones of the dead, especially of caciques and great men, enclosed sometimes in baskets, sometimes in plaited cotton images, were regarded as powerful fetishes; and from what is told us of the funeral ceremonies certain beliefs may be inferred. The statement by Columbus, already quoted, closes with an account of some such rites: "When these Indians die, they have several ways of performing their obsequies, but the manner of burying their caciques is thus: they open and dry him at the fire, that he may keep whole. Of others they take only the head, others they bury in a grot or den, and lay a calabash of water and bread on his head; others they burn in the house where they die, and when they are at the last gasp, they suffer them not to die but strangle them; and this is done to caciques. Others are turned out of the house, and others put them into a hammock, which is their bed, laying bread and water by their head, never returning to see them any more. Some that are dangerously ill are carried to the cacique, who tells them whether they are to be strangled or not, and what he says is done. I have taken pains to find out what it is they believe, and whether they know what becomes of them after they are dead," and the answer was that "they go to a certain vale, which every great cacique supposes to be in his country, where they affirm they find their parents and all their predecessors, and that they eat, have women, and give themselves up to pleasures and pastimes." This is very much the belief of all the primitive world, but it has one interesting feature. The strangling of caciques and of those named by caciques clearly indicates that there was a belief in a different fate for men who die by nature and men who die with the breath of life not yet exhausted; quite likely it was some Valhalla reserved for the brave, such as the Norseman found who escaped the "straw death," or the Aztec warrior whom Tonatiuh snatched up into the mansions of the Sun.
IV. TAÏNO MYTHS16
"I ordered," says Columbus, "one Friar Ramon, who understood their language, to set down all their language and antiquities"; and it is to this Fray Ramon Pane, "a poor anchorite of the order of St. Jerome," as he tells us, that thanks are due for most of what is preserved of Taïno mythology. The myths which he gathered are from the island of Haiti, or Hispaniola, but it is safe to assume that they represent cycles of tales shared by all the Taïno peoples. They believe, says the friar, in an invisible and immortal Being, like Heaven, and they speak of the mother of this heaven-son, who was called, among other names, Atabei, "the First-in-Existence." "They also know whence they came, the origin of the sun and moon, how the sea was made, and whither the dead go."
The earliest Indians appeared, according to the legend, from two caverns of a certain mountain of Hispaniola—"most of the people that first inhabited the island came out of Cacibagiagua," while the others emerged from Amaiauva (it is altogether likely that the two caves represent two races or tribal stocks). Before the people came forth, a watchman, Marocael, guarded the entrances by night; but, once delaying his return into the caves until after dawn, the sun transformed him into a stone; while others, going a-fishing, were also caught by the sun and were changed into trees. As for the sun and moon, they, too, came from a certain grotto, called Giovava, to which, says Fray Ramon, the Indians paid great veneration, having it all painted "without any figure, but with leaves and the like"; and keeping in it two stone zemis which looked "as if they sweated"; to these they went when they wanted rain.
PLATE III.
Antillean stone ring, of the ovate type, with carved panels. Stone rings, or "collars," form one of the types of symbolic stones from this region the significance of which has so profoundly puzzled archaeologists. Reference to their possible meaning will be found on page 24 and note 14. there referred to. The specimen here figured is in the Museum of the American Indian, New York. Joyce (Central American Archaeology, pages 189-91) interprets the design as a human figure. The disks on either side of the head are ear-plugs; arms and hands may be seen supporting them; the pit between the elbows is the umbilicus; while the legs are represented by the upper segments of the decorated panels exterior to the disks.
The story of the origin of the sea is a little more complex. In introducing the tale, Fray Ramon says: "I, writing in haste and not having paper enough, could not place everything rightly.... Let us now return to what we should have said first, that is, their opinion concerning the origin and beginning of the sea." There was a certain man, Giaia, whose son, Giaiael ("Giaia's son"), undertook to kill his father, but was himself slain by the parent, who put the bones into a calabash, which he hung in the top of his house. One day he took the calabash down, and looking into it, an abundance of fishes, great and small, came forth, since into these the bones had changed. Later on, while Giaia was absent, there came to his house four sons, born at a birth from a certain woman, Itiba Tahuvava, who was cut open that they might be delivered—"the first that they cut out was Caracaracol, that is, 'Mangy.'" These four brothers took the calabash and ate of the fish, but seeing Giaia returning, in their haste they replaced it badly, with the result that "there ran so much water from it as overflowed all the country, and with it came out abundance of fish, and hence they believe the sea had its origin." Fray Ramon goes on to tell how, the four brothers being hungry, one of them begged cassaba bread of a certain man, but was struck by him with tobacco. Thereupon his shoulder swelled up painfully; and when it was opened, a live female tortoise issued forth—"so they built their house and bred
