Latin American Mythology
By Hartley Burr Alexander

Index

CHAPTER I. THE ANTILLES

I The Islanders
II The First Encounters
III Zemiism
IV Taino Myths
V The Areitos
VI Carib Lore

THE ISLANDERS

¹ A GLANCE at a map of the Western Hemisphere reveals two great continents, North and South America, somewhat tenuously united by the Isthmus and the Antilles. The Isthmus is solid, mountainous land, forming a part of that backbone of the hemisphere which extends along its western border, continuous from Alaska to the Land of Fire. The Antilles are an archipelago, or rather a group of archipelagoes, extending without gap from the tip of Florida to Trinidad and the mouths of the Orinoco. Both connexions have a certain weight, or leaning, toward North America. The Isthmus narrows southward almost to the point of its attachment to South America, while to the north it broadens out into Central America, the peninsula of Yucatan, and the plateau of Mexico. Similarly, the southern division of the archipelago, the Lesser Antilles, forms an arc of islets, mere stepping-stones, as it were, from the southern continent to the large islands of the Greater Antilles Porto Rico, Hispaniola or Haiti, Jamaica, Cuba which are natural outliers of the continent to the north. Cuba, indeed, almost unites Yucatan and Florida; while breasting Cuba and Florida, toward the open sea, is a third island group, the Bahamas, still further emphasizing the northern predominance.

There is a superficial resemblance between the connexions of the northern and southern land bodies in the Old World and in the New the Isthmus of Suez having its counterpart in Panama; the peninsulas and large islands of southern Europe corresponding to Florida, Yucatan, and the Greater Antilles; and the break at Gibraltar suggesting the uncertain bridge of the Lesser Antilles. But the resemblance is merely superficial. The Mediterranean served far more as a unifier than as a divider of cultures and civilizations in antiquity; all its shores were in a sense a single land even before Rome united them politically. The Caribbean, on the other hand, was a true obstacle to the primitive intercourse of the western continents, having its proper Old World analogue in the Sahara Desert rather than in the Mediterranean Sea. In fact, we can carry this truer analogy a step further, pointing out that just as Old World culture went southward, from Egypt into Ethiopia, by way of the comparatively secure route of the Nile, so New World civilization found its securest path by way of the solid land of the Isthmus, while the islets of the Lesser Antilles and the isle-like oases of the Sahara were alike unfriendly to profoundly influential intercourse.

In one striking particular the analogies of the Old World are reversed in the New: at least in recent periods, the migration of native races and culture has been from the south to the north. This is the more extraordinary in view of the land predominance which, as has been indicated, belongs to the north. The Isthmus was held by, and is now representative of, the Chibchan stock, extending far south into Ecuador; while the Antilles, at the time of the discovery, were almost entirely possessed by tribes of two great South American stocks, Arawakan and Carib. In Cuba, and probably in the Bahamas, there were remnants of more ancient peoples timid and crude folk, whose kindred seem to have been the makers of the shell-mounds of Florida, and whose provenience was doubtless the northern continent; but neither the race nor the affinities of these vanished peoples is certainly known; even in pre-Columbian times they were succumbing to the war-like Calusa of southern Florida and to the still more dangerous Arawakan tribes from the south.

Of the two powerful races from the south, the first comers were doubtless the Taino ² (as the Antillean Arawak are named), whom the Spaniards found in possession of most of Cuba and of the other greater islands, Porto Rico alone showing a strong Carib element along with the Arawak. The Lesser Antilles, bordering the sea which was named for their race, was inhabited by Carib tribes, whose language comprised a man-tongue and a woman-tongue, the latter contain- ing many Arawak words a fact which has led to the interesting (though uncertain) inference that the first Carib invaders slew all the warriors of their Arawak predecessors, taking the women for their own wives. Only when they came to Porto Rico, the first of the Greater Antilles in their route, were they partially stopped by the mass and strength of the more highly developed Taino peoples; some, indeed, obtained a foothold here, while beyond, in Hispaniola, one of the five caciques ³ dividing the power of the island was reputed a Carib, and in Cuba itself have been found bones believed to be those of Carib marauders. The typical culture of the Antilles, that of the Arawakan Taino, was scarcely less aggressive than the Carib. Arawaks gained a foothold in Florida, and their influence, in trade at least, seems to have extended far into Muskhogean territories to the north, while it may have affected Yucatan and Honduras to the west. Nor was it meanly savage in type. The Antilles furnish every incentive of climate, food supply, rich resources, and easy communication for development of civilization; and at the time of the discovery of the Taino peoples, they were already advanced in the arts of agriculture, pottery-making, weaving, and stoneworking, combined with some knowledge of metals. Further-more, they had developed their social organization to such an extent that their chiefs, or caciques, with power in some cases hereditary, were the heads of veritable nations all of Jamaica was under one ruler, Hispaniola had five, while the Ciboney of Cuba and the Borinquefio of Porto Rico were powerful peoples. The Spanish conquerors of the islands succeeded early in virtually annihilating these nations, but their handiwork and the traditions which they have left still command respect.

II. THE FIRST ENCOUNTERS

⁴ Even before Columbus's day the mythical Island of Antilia was marked on the maps out in the Atlantic west; and when the archipelago which Columbus first discovered came to be known as an archipelago, the name, in the plural form Antilles, was not unnaturally applied to it. Probably, too, it was with more than the glamour of discovery enchanting as that must have been that Columbus first looked upon the newfound lands. From time immemorial European imagination had been haunted by legends of Isles of the Gods, Isles of the Happy Dead Fortunate Isles, in some weird sense, lying far out in the enchanted seas; and it is no marvel if Columbus should have felt himself the finder of this blessed realm. In one of his letters to Ferdinand and Isabella he wrote:

"This country excels all others as far as the day surpasses the night in splendour; the natives love their neighbours as themselves; their conversation is the sweetest imaginable; their faces always smiling; and so gentle and so affectionate are they that I swear to your highness there is not a better people in the world."

Something of the same idealization, coupled with a happy ignorance, underlay, no doubt, the statement which Columbus makes in his letters to Ferdinand's officials, Gabriel Sanchez and Luis de Santangel, describing his first voyage: "They are not acquainted with any kind of worship and are not idolaters, but believe that all power and, indeed, all good things are in heaven." Columbus adds that the natives believed him and his vessels and his crews to be descended from heaven, and the Indians whom he took with him from his first landing, to serve as interpreters, cried out to the others, "Come, come, and see the people from heaven!" This same simplicity was cruelly exploited by the Spaniards of later date, for after the mines of Hispaniola were opened, and the native labour of the island was exhausted, the Bahamas were nearly emptied of inhabitants by the ruse that the Spaniards would convey them to the shores where dwelt their departed relatives and friends. Belief in heaven-spirits and belief in living souls of their dead were surely deep-seated in these first-met of New World peoples.

The earliest encounters were probably with tribes of the Tamo race, for the Indians taken from San Salvador were readily understood in the Greater Antilles; and it was with this race that Columbus had to do on his initial voyage. Yet even then he was learning of other peoples. He was told that in the western part of Cuba ("Juana" was the name he gave to the island) there was a province whose inhabitants were born with tails a form of derogation of inferior peoples familiar in many parts of the world and the story very likely designated remnants of the autochthones of the islands. Again, as he explored eastward, he began to hear of the Carib cannibals, with whom he became acquainted on later voyages. "These are the men," he reports, "who form unions with certain women who dwell alone in the island of Matenino, which lies next to Espanola on the side toward India; these latter employ themselves in no labour suitable to their own sex, for they use bows and javelins as I have already described their paramours as doing, and for defensive armour they have plates of brass, of which metal they possess great abundance." Thus we have the beginning of that legend of Amazons ⁵ in the New World which not only occupied the fancies of explorers and historiographers for many decades, but eventually, as the domain of these mythical women was pushed farther and farther into the beyond, gave its name to the great river which drains what was then the mysterious heart of the southern continent. Possibly the source of the tale lay in a difference of Tamo and Carib customs, for among the latter the women, as the Spaniards speedily discovered, were quick with bow and spear; possibly it lay in the fact, already noted, that the Caribs, dispatching the men of a conquered tribe, formed unions with their women, who spoke a language differing from that of their conquerors.

Other legends of the Old World, besides that of Amazonian warriors, gained a footing in the New, mingling, not infrequently, with similar native tales. The "Septe Cidade" of the Island of Antilia had been founded, according to Portuguese tradition, by the Archbishop of Oporto and six bishops, fleeing from the Moors in the eighth century; and it was these cities, identified by the Spaniards with the seven caves whence the Aztecs traced their race, that led Cabeza de Vaca onward in his search for the Seven Cities of Cibola and resulted in the discovery of the Pueblos in New Mexico. Similarly, Ponce de Leon partly brought and partly found the story of the Fountain of Youth, ⁶ or the life-renewing Jordan, in search of which he went into Florida. The story is narrated in the "Memoir on Florida" of Hernando d'Escalente Fontaneda, who says that the Indians of Cuba and the other isles told lies of this mythical river; but that the story was not merely invented as a gratification of the Spaniards' thirst for marvels is suggested by Fontaneda's further statement that long before his time a great number of Indians from Cuba had come into Florida in search of this same wonder a possible explanation of the Arawakan colony on the Florida coast.

But it was chiefly with tales of gold that the Spaniards' ears were pleasured. Columbus, writing to de Santangel, promised his sovereigns not only spices and dyes and Brazil-wood from their new realm, fruits and cotton and slaves, but "gold as much as they need"; and this promise was all too well founded for the good of either Spaniard or native, since the spoil of western gold, more than aught else, resulted in the wars which eventually impoverished Spain; and thirst for sudden wealth was the chief cause of the early extermination of the native peoples of the Antilles. Las Casas, bitter and full of pity, gives us the contrasting pictures. The first is of the cacique Hatuey, ⁷ fled from Haiti to Cuba to escape the Spaniards and there assembling his people before a chest of gold: "Behold," he said, "the god of the Spaniards! Let us do to him, if it seem good to you, areitos [solemn dances], that thus doing we shall please him, and he will command the Spaniards that they do us no harm." The other is the image of the Spanish tyrant, enslaving the Indians in mines "to the end that he might make gold of the bodies and souls of those for whom Jesus Christ suffered death."

III. ZEMIISM

⁸The Spanish conquistador, reckless of native life in his eager quest of gold, and the Spanish preaching friar, often yielding himself to death for the spread of the Gospel, are the two types of men most impressively delineated in the pages of the first decades of Spain's history in America, illustrating the complex and conflicting motives which urged the great adventure. As early as the writings of Columbus these two motives stand out, and the promise of wealth and the promise of souls to save are alike eloquent in his thought. In order to convert, one must first understand; and Columbus himself is our earliest authority on the religion of the men of the Indies, showing how his mind was moved to this problem. In the History of the Life of Columbus, by his son Fernando, the Admiral is quoted in description of the Indian religion.

"I could discover," he says, "neither idolatry nor any other sect among them, though every one of their kings . . . has a house apart from the town, in which there is nothing at all but some wooden images carved by them, called cemis , nor is there anything done in those houses but what is for the service of those cemis, they repairing to perform certain ceremonies, and pray there, as we do to our churches. In these houses they have a handsome round table, made like a dish, on which is some powder which they lay on the head of the cemis with a certain ceremony; then through a cane that has two branches, clapped to their nose, they snuff up this powder: the words they say none of our people understand. This powder puts them beside themselves, as if they were drunk. They also give the image a name, and I believe it is their father's or grandfather's, or both; for they have more than one, and some above ten, all in memory of their forefathers. . . . The people and caciques boast among themselves of having the best cemis. When they go to these, their cemis, they shun the Christians, and will not let them go into those houses; and if they suspect they will come, they take away their cemis and hide them in the woods for fear they should be taken from them; and what is most ridiculous, they used to steal one another's cemis. It happened once that the Christians on a sudden rushed into the house with them, and presently the cemi cried out, speaking in their language, by which it appeared to be artificially made; for it being hollow they had applied a trunk to it, which answered to a dark corner of the house covered with boughs and leaves, where a man was concealed who spoke what the cacique ordered him. The Spaniards, therefore, reflecting on what it might be, kicked down the cemi, and found as has been said; and the cacique, seeing they had discovered his practice, earnestly begged of them not to speak of it to his subjects, or the other Indians, because he kept them in obedience by that policy."

This, the great Admiral quaintly concedes, "has some resemblance to idolatry." In fact, his description points clearly to well-developed cults: there are temples, with altars, idols, oracles, and priests, and there is even a shrewd adaptation of religion to politics the certain mark of sophistication in matters of cult. Benzoni, who visited the Indies some fifty years after their discovery, says of the islanders: "They worshipped, and still worship, various deities, many painted, others sculptured, some formed of clay, others of wood, or gold, or silver. . . . And although our priests still daily endeavour to destroy these idols, yet the ministers of their faith keep a great many of them hidden in caves and underground, sacrificing to them occultly, and asking in what manner they can possibly expel the Christians from their country." Idols of gold and silver have not been preserved to modern times, but examples in stone and wood and baked clay are in present-day collections, and one, at least, of the wooden images has a hollow head, open at the back for the reception of the speaking-tube by which the priest conveyed the wisdom of his cacique. A peculiar type of Antillean cultus-image, mentioned by Peter Martyr, among others, was made of "plaited cotton, tightly stuffed inside," though its use seems to have been rather in connexion with funeral rites (perhaps as apotropaic fetishes) than in worship of nature-powers.

The work of archaeologists, especially in the Greater Antilles, has brought to light many curious objects certainly connected with the old Antillean cults. There are idols and images, ranging in height from near three feet to an inch or so; and the latter, often perforated, were used, perhaps, as Peter Martyr describes: "When they are about to go into battle, they tie small images representing little demons upon their foreheads." There are, again, masks and grotesque faces, sometimes cunningly carved, sometimes crude pictographs. Most characteristic are the triangular stones with a human or an animal face on one side; the stone collars or yokes, some slender and some massive in construction, but all representing laborious toil; and the "elbow stones" with carved panels objects of which the true use and meaning is forgotten, though their connexion with cult is not to be doubted. ⁹ Possibly a hint of their meaning is to be found in the narrative of Columbus, which, after describing the zemis, goes on to say: "Most of the caciques have three great stones also, to which they and their people show a great devotion. The one they say helps corn and all sorts of grain; the second makes women be delivered without pain; and the third procures rain and fair weather, according as they stand in need of either."

From the name zemi (variously spelt by the older writers), applied to the Antillean cult-images, the aboriginal faith of this region has come to be called zemiism; and it is not difficult, from the descriptions left us, to reconstruct its general character. "They believe," says Peter Martyr, "that the zemes send rain or sunshine in response to their prayers, according to their needs. They believe the zemes to be intermediaries between them and God, whom they represent as one, eternal, omnipotent, and invisible. Each cacique has his zemeSj which he honours with particular care. Their ancestors gave to the supreme and eternal Being two names, locauna and Guamaonocon. But this supreme Being was himself brought forth by a mother, who has five names, Attabeira, Mamona, Guacarapita, lella, and Guimazoa." Here we have the typical American Indian conception of Mother Earth and Father Sky and a host of intermediary powers, deriving their potency in some dim way from the two great life-givers. In the name zemi itself is perhaps an indication of the animistic foundation of the religion, for by some authorities it is held to mean "animal" or "animal-being," while others see in it a corruption of guami, "ruler" a source which would ally it with one of the terms for the Supreme Being as given by Peter Martyr; for Guamaonocon is interpreted as meaning "Ruler of the Earth."

Other appellations of the Sky Father, who "lives in the sun," are Jocakuvague, Yocahu, Vague, and Maorocon or Maorocoti; while Fray Ramon Pane gives names for the Earth Mother closely paralleling Peter Martyr's list: Atabei ("First-in-Being"), lermaoguacar, Apito, and Zuimaco. Guabancex was a goddess of wind and water, and had two subordinates, Guatauva, her messenger, and Coatrischie, the tempest-raiser. Yobanua-Borna was a rain-deity whose shrine was in a cavern, and who likewise had two subordinates, or ministers. The Haitians ar,e said to have made pilgrimages to a cave in which were kept two statues of wood, gods again of rain, or of sun and rain; and it is likely that the double-figure images preserved from this region are representations of these or of some other pair of Antillean twin deities. Baidrama, or Vaybrama, was also seemingly a twinned divinity, and clearly was the strength-giver: "They say," Fray Ramon tells us, "in time of wars he was burnt, and afterwards being washed with the juice of yucca, his arms grew out again, his body spread, and he recovered his eyes"; and the worshippers of the god bathed themselves in the sap of the yucca when they desired strength or healing. Other zemis mentioned by Pane are Opigielguoviran, a dog-like being which plunged into a morass when the Spaniards came, never to be seen again; and Faraguvaol, a beam or tree-trunk with the power of wandering at will. Here there seems to be indication of a vegetation-cult, which is borne out by Pane's description of the way in which wooden zemis were made strikingly analogous to West African fetish-construction: "Those of wood are made thus: when any one is travelling he says he sees some tree that shakes its root; the man, in great fright, stops and asks who he is; it answers, 'My name is Buhuitihu [a name for priest, or medicine-man], ¹⁰ and he will inform you 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. TAINO MYTHS

¹¹ "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 Tamo 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 Tamo 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.

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 up the tortoise."

"I understood no more of this matter, and what we have writ signifies but little, " continues the friar; yet to the modern reader the tales have all the marks of a primitive cosmogony, a cosmogony having many analogues in similar tales from the two Americas. The notion of a cave or caves from which the parents of the human race and of the animal kinds issue to people the world is ubiquitous in America; so, too, is the notion of an age of transformations, in which beings were altered from their first forms. Peter Martyr, who tells the same stories in resume, as he says, of Pane's manuscript, adds a number of interesting details; as that after the metamorphosis of Marocael, or Machchael, as Martyr calls him, the First Race were refused entrance into the caves when the sun rose "because they sought to sin," and so were transformed a moral element which recalls similar motifs in Pueblo myths. But perhaps the most striking analogies are with the cosmogonies of the Algonquian and Iroquoian stocks. The four Caracarols (caracal, "shell," plural cacaracol, is the evident derivation), one of whom was called "Mangy," recall the Stone Giants, and again recall the twins or (as in a Potawatomi version) quadruplets whose birth causes their mother's death, while the tortoise cut from the shoulder (Martyr says it was a woman by whom the brothers successively became fathers of sons and daughters) is at least suggestive of the cosmogonic turtle of North American myth. In the flood-legend, the idea of fishes being formed from bones is remotely paralleled by the Eskimo conception of the creation of fishes from the finger-bones of the daughter of Anguta; and Benzoni tells how, in his day, the Haitians still had a pumpkin as a relic, " saying that it had come out of the sea with all the fish in it."

In the order of his narrative though not, apparently, in the order in which he deemed the events ought to lie Fray Ramon follows the story of the emergence of the First People from caves with the adventures of a hero whom he calls Guagugiana, but whom Peter Martyr terms Vagoniona. It is easy to recognize in this hero an example of the demiurgic Trickster-Transformer so common in American myth. Like the Trickster elsewhere, he has a servant or comrade, Giadruvava, and the first story that Pane tells is one of which we would fain have a fuller version, for even the fragmentary sketch of it is full of poetic suggestion. Guagugiana, it seems, was one of the cave-dwellers of the First Race. One day he sent forth his servant to seek a certain cleansing herb, but, as Pane has it, "the sun took him by the way, and he became a bird that sings in the morning, like the nightingale"; to which Peter Martyr adds that "on every anniversary of his transformation he fills the night air with songs, bewailing his misfortunes and imploring his master to come to his help."

In this tale, slender as it is, there is an element of unusual interest, fortified by various other allusions to Antillean beliefs. It would appear that the First People, the cave-dwellers, were of the nature of spirits or souls, and that the Sun was the true Transformer, whose strength-giving rays gave to each, as it emerged to light, the form which it was to keep. The disembodied soul (opio) haunts the night, moreover, as if night were its native season; in the day it is powerless, and men have no fear of it. Surely it is a beautiful myth which makes of the night-bird's song a longing for the free life of the spirit, or at least an expression of the feeling of kinship with the spiritworld.

The tale goes on to tell how Guagugiana, lamenting his lost comrade, resolved to go forth from the cave in which the First People dwelt. Yet he went not alone, for he called to the women: "Leave your husbands! Let us go into other countries, where we shall get jewels enough! Leave your children; we will come again for them; carry only herbs with you." The women, abandoning all save their nursing children (as Peter Martyr tells), followed Guagugiana to the island of Matenino, and there he left them; but the children he took away and abandoned them beside a brook or perhaps, as Martyr implies, he brought them back and left them on the shore of the sea where, starving, they cried, "Toa, toa," which is to say, "Milk, milk!" "And they thus crying and begging of the earth, saying, 'toa, toa,' like one that very earnestly begs a thing, they were transformed into little creatures like dwarfs, and called tona, because of their begging the earth." Martyr's more prosaic version says that they were transformed into frogs; but both authorities agree that this is how the men came to be left without wives; and doubtless it is this myth from which Columbus gained at least a part of his notion of the Amazon-like women "who dwell alone in the island of Matenino."

Other episodes in the career of Guagugiana, which Pane recounts in a confused way, are his going to sea with a companion whom he tricked into looking for precious shells and then threw overboard; his finding of a woman of the sea who taught him a cure for the pox; this woman's name was Guabonito, and she taught him the use of amulets and of ornaments of white stone and of gold. Peter Martyr's variant says: "He is supposed to go to meet a beautiful woman, perceived in the depths of the sea, from whom are obtained the white shells called by the natives cibas, and other shells of a yellowish colour called guianos, of both of which they make necklaces; the caciques, in our own time, regard these trinkets as sacred." In this there is a striking suggestion of the Pueblo myths of the White-Shell Woman of the East and of the sea-dwelling Guardian of the yellow shells of the West; and it is quite to be inferred that the regard in which the caciques held these objects was due to a ritual and magical significance analogous to that which we know in the Pueblos.

V. THE AREITOS

¹² "The Spaniards," says Peter Martyr, "lived for some time in Hispaniola without suspecting that the islanders worshipped anything else than the stars, or that they had any kind of religion, . . . but after mingling with them for some years . . . many of the Spaniards began to notice among them divers ceremonies and rites." These ceremonies are called areitos, or areytos, by the Spanish writers; and from the early descriptions it is obvious that they were rites of the typical American kind, dramatic dances or mysteries performed in the great crises of national and personal life, or in the changes and climaxes of that course of the seasons, which is the life of Nature. As in the case of myths, so in the case of rites, it is chiefly those of Haiti which are described for us; but there is little reason to doubt that these are typical of all the Greater Antilles.

Birth, marriage, death, going to war, curing the sick, initiation, and puberty rites all seem to have had their appropriate ceremonies. Songs played an important part in these ceremonies; indeed, the word areito is frequently restricted to funeral chants, or elegies in praise of heroes. But the chief rite known to us, and, we may feel assured, the chief rite of the whole Tamo culture, was the ceremony in honour of the Earth Goddess. This ceremony, as celebrated by the Haitians, is described by both Benzoni and Gomara with some detail. Gomara's account is as follows : ¹³

"When the cacique celebrated the festival in honour of his principal idol, all the people attended the function. They decorated the idol very elaborately; the priests arranged themselves like a choir about the king, and the cacique sat at the entrance of the temple with a drum at his side. The men came painted black, red, blue, and other colours or covered with branches and garlands of flowers, or feathers and shells, wearing shell bracelets and little shells on their arms and rattles on their feet. The women also came with similar rattles, but naked, if they were maids, and not painted; if married, wearing only breechcloths. They approached dancing, and singing to the sound of the shells, and as they approached the cacique he saluted them with a drum. Having entered the temple, they vomited, putting a small stick into their throat, in order to show the idol that they had nothing evil in their stomach. They seated themselves like tailors and prayed with a low voice. Then there approached many women bearing baskets and cakes on their heads and many roses, flowers, and fragrant herbs. They formed a circle as they prayed and began to chant something like an old ballad in praise of the god. All rose to respond at the close of the ballad; they changed their tone and sang another song in praise of the cacique, after which they offered the bread to the idol, kneeling. The priests took the gift, blessed, and divided it; and so the feast ended, but the recipients of the bread preserved it all the year and held that house unfortunate and liable to many dangers which was without it."

In this rite it is easy to recognize a festival in honour of a divinity of fertility, probably a corn deity, or perhaps a goddess who is the mother of corn spirits. Benzoni says of the Haitians that "they worshipped two wooden figures as the gods of abundance, and at some periods of the year many Indians went on a pilgrimage to them." These may be the two zemis of the painted grotto of the Sun and the Moon, mentioned by Ramon Pane and Peter Martyr, for the latter says that "they go on pilgrimages to that cavern just as we go to Rome"; but it is certain that they were associated with agriculture, since it was to them that prayers were made for rain and fruitfulness. In an interesting old picture, printed in Picart, the rite of the Earth Goddess is represented, much as described by Gomara and Benzoni. The goddess herself is shown with several heads, each that of a different animal, and near her are two lesser idols of grotesque form. It is possible that the Earth was conceived as the mother of all life, animal as well as vegetable, and that her two attendants represented yucca and maize, the two principal food plants of the Antilleans. Some authorities regard the chief of the Tai'no gods, the son of the great First-in-Being, as a yucca spirit; and, indeed, the name of the plant appears to enter into such forms as locauna, Jocakuvague, Yocahuguama.

Yet it is little likely that we shall ever have certainty on this point, for of the poems which, Peter Martyr tells us, the sons of chiefs sang to the people on feast days, in the form of sacred chants, none are preserved to us.

That the Taino had, besides these great public festivals, rites for the individual also is abundantly witnessed in the old books. Like all American Indians, they were mystics and vision-seekers. Benzoni says that when the doctors wished to cure a man who was ill, he was lulled into unconsciousness by tobacco smoke, and "on returning to his senses he told a thousand stories of his having been at the council of the gods and other high visions" a description which recalls im Thurn's account of his own experiences in the hands of an Arawak peaiman. ¹⁴ Something analogous to the individual totem, or "medicine," of other Indians was certainly known to them. "The islanders," says Peter Martyr, "pay homage to numerous zemes, each person having his own. Some are made of wood, because it is amongst the trees and in the darkness of night they have received the message of the gods. Others, who have heard the voice among the rocks, make their zemes of stone; while others, who heard their revelation while they were cultivating their ages the kind of cereal I have already mentioned [sweet potato, or yam], make theirs of roots." Martyr goes on to describe trances, induced, he thinks, by tobacco, in which the chiefs seek prophetic revelations, stammered out in incoherent words. One of the most interesting of the early stories tells of such a prophecy received from Yocahuguama, the yucca spirit. Doubtless the earliest version of the tale is that of Ramon Pane: ¹⁵

"That great lord who, they say, is in heaven ... is this Cazziva [cassava], who kept a sort of abstinence here, which all of them generally perform; for they shut themselves up six or seven days, without taking any sustenance but the juice of herbs, with which they also wash themselves. After this time they begin to eat something that is nourishing. During the time they have been without eating, weakness makes them say they have seen something they earnestly desired, for they all perform that abstinence in honour of the cemies to know whether they shall obtain victory over their enemies, or to acquire wealth or any other thing they desire. They say this cacique affirmed he spoke with Giocauvaghama, who told him that whosoever survived him would not long enjoy his power, because they should see a people clad, in their country, who would rule over and kill them, and they should die for hunger. They thought at first these should be the cannibals, but afterwards considering that they only plundered and fled, they believed it was some other people the cemi spoke of; and now they believe it is the admiral and those that came with him." This is the first of those stories of clothed and bearded strangers (the beard is added in some versions), coming to overthrow the gods and kingdoms of the Indians, which were encountered in various portions of the New World. So much importance was attached to it, says Gomara, that a song was formed commemorating it, sung as an areito in a ceremonial dance.

VI. CARIB LORE

¹⁶ Not only Columbus, but other early writers praised the peacefully happy and amiably virtuous character of the Indians of the Bahamas and the Greater Antilles; and though this description may have been in some degree coloured by their ideal of what dwellers in the Fortunate Isles ought to be, there is yet little in the old accounts of these Indians to contravene their good report. With small question, however, this same picture served only to intensify the grimness of its companion portrait, for the folk of the Lesser Antilles, the "Caribbee Islands" of seamen's romance, were painted as hard and mirthless savages, murderers and marauders, ferocious in war, and abhorrent cannibals altogether such as would be dramatically appropriate as the aborigines of islands that were to become the paradise of pirates.

On his second voyage Columbus encountered men of this race, finding them treacherous and fierce. Unlike the Tai'no, the men wore their hair long and they painted themselves with strange devices; their beards were plucked out, and their eyes and eyebrows were stained to give them a terrible appearance at least so thought Chanca, who describes them for us. The women that is, the true Carib women, not the captives, of whom they had many were as savage fighters as the men; and the Spaniards distinguished them from the captive Tai'no women by the leg-bands, fastened below the knee and above the ankle, which caused the legmuscles to swell out a trait recorded by im Thurn of the true Carib of Guiana.

There is small question that these people came from the mouth of the Orinoco in the southern continent just as the ancestors of the Tai'no had doubtless come before them; and even at the time of the discovery they were invading the Greater Antilles and had secured a foothold in Porto Rico. Nevertheless, they had already been in the lesser islands for a period sufficiently long to differentiate them, in a degree, from their continental congeners and to develop among them a distinctly Antillean type of Carib culture, related on the one hand to the continent they had left, on the other to the islands they had conquered. Doubtless the fundamental modification was due not so much to the change of habitat or to the difference between alluvial and insular life as to the fact repeated from Columbus onward that they spared and married with the women of the dispossessed tribes and so fell heirs to many of their arts and ideas.

Of all Carib customs, after their cannibalism (the word "cannibal" is a variant of "Carib"), the most striking is the couvade the Custom whereby the husband and father, at the birth of a child, takes to his bed, or rather hammock, as if he were suffering the pangs of labour. For forty days he remains in retirement, fasting or on meagre diet; and at the end of this period a feast is held at which the invited guests lacerate the skin of the patient with their nails and wash the wounds with a solution of red pepper, he bearing his pain heroically. Even then his trials are not at an end; for six moons more he must be careful of his food should he eat turtle, the child will become deaf, and so of other creatures, bird and fish, such being Pere du Tertre's description of this rite, still in vogue on the southern continent.

Other Carib festivals are mentioned by Davies. A ceremony attended a council of war, the killing of an enemy, and the return from war; the launching of a canoe, the building of a house, and the making of a garden; the birth of a child and the cutting of its hair; adolescence and participation in the first war-party; the death of parents, husband, or wife. They had, of course, their doctors or medicine-men the peaimen of the continent, apparently called boii by the islanders, a name which is surely a variant of the Tai'no buhuitihu and doubtless was adopted from the latter; especially as Maboya ("the Great Boye" or "Great Snake") is a name recorded for the tutelary power of these boii, or "snakes." Maboya, or Mapoia, is the god who sends the hurricane; and here we have an interesting point of contact with the mythology of the great isthmus, since Hurakan, the hurricane, is the Mayan storm-god. Du Tertre says that [there were many Maboyas; and it may be that the term is the insular equivalent for "Kenaima," by which the mainland Carib designate a member of the class of death-bringing powers.

Good spirits were also recognized. The names Akambou and Yris are found for the highest of all, and the name Chemin doubtless related to zemi is applied to the sky-god. It may be that the island Carib possessed a whole pantheon of celestial deities, or perhaps the name for the Great Spirit varied from island to island, as similar names vary among the related tribes of Guiana.

Fragments of the legends of the island Carib are preserved. Louquo, the first man, came down from the sky; other men were born from his body; and after his death he ascended into the heavens. The sky itself is eternal; the earth, at first soft, was hardened by the sun's rays. The First Race of men were nearly exterminated by a deluge, from which a lucky few escaped in a canoe. After death the soul of the valiant Carib ascends to heaven; the stars are Carib souls. All these are beliefs which we need not ascribe to Old World suggestion, for they are found far and wide in America; and equally native must be the Carib notion that each man has three souls one in his heart, one in his head, and one in his shoulders though it is only the heart-soul that ascends to paradise at death, while the other two wander abroad as dangerous and evil powers. The islanders possessed also a legend of their origin or migration from among the Galibi, their continental relatives, "Galibi" being, apparently, yet another variant of "Carib." Their ancestor, Kalinago, they said, wearying of life among his own people, embarked for the conquest of new lands, and after a long voyage settled in Santo Domingo with his kin, where his numerous children, conspiring against him, gave him poison. His body died, but his soul found an avatar in a terrible fish, Atraioman; while his slayers, pursued by his vengeance, scattered afar among all the isles. Wherever they went, they destroyed the men, but spared the women; and they placed the heads of their enemies in rocky caves that they might show their sons and their sons' sons these symbols of the valour of their fathers. According to some tales all brave Caribs at death enter a paradise where they forever wage successful war against the Arawak, while cowards are condemned in the future world to be enslaved to Arawak masters.

A more agreeable picture of Carib nature is suggested by their belief in Icheiri a kind of Lares and Penates to whom in each cabin was erected an altar of banana leaves or of cane, upon which were placed offerings of cassava flour and of the first fruits of the field, these Icheiri being conceived as kindly and familiar intermediaries between man below and the distant heaven power above. There were also spirits that could enter into a man to lead him to inspired vision "medicine" spirits, or tutelaries. The god Yris seems to have been of this character, for du Tertre, who received the story from one of the missionaries in Santo Domingo, relates that Yris entered into a certain woman and transported her far above the sun, where she saw lands of a marvellous beauty with verdant mountains from which gushed springs of living water; and the god promised her that after her death she should come thither to dwell with him forever. The savage mystic, too, it would appear, has her visions of a divine spouse, who shall one day welcome her into the heaven above the heavens.

NOTES

1. Among early writers on Antillean religion the most important are Christopher Columbus, Ramon Pane, and Peter Martyr d'Anghiera. Columbus left Fray Ramon Pane in Haiti with instructions to report on the religious beliefs of the natives; and in Fernando Columbus's Historie, ch. Ixii, Pane's narrative is incorporated, introduced by a brief quotation from Christopher Columbus, describing Zemiism.

2. After Pane, the account of Haitian religion in Peter Martyr's " First Decade" is the most important source, although Benzoni, Gomara, Herrera, Las Casas, and Oviedo give additional or corroborative information. Of recent writings those of J. W. Fewkes, embodying the results of careful archaeological studies, form the most important contribution. Part ii of Joyce's Central American and West Indian Archaeology gives a general survey of the field, which is more briefly treated in livre ii, partie, of Beuchat's Manuel, and in its comparative aspects by Wissler, The American Indian.

2. Beuchat, Joyce [a], and Fewkes [b] describe the condition of the Antilleans at the time of the discovery as reconstructed from early accounts and archaeological investigations. Of the early writings, the descriptions of Las Casas are the most detailed. The use of Taino to designate the island Arawakan tribes follows Fewkes [b], p. 26: "Among the first words heard by the comrades of Columbus when they landed in Guadeloupe were 'Taino! tainoT 'Peace! peace!' or 'We are friends.' The designation 'taino' has been used by several writers as a characteristic name for the Antillean race. Since it is both significant and euphonious, it may be adopted as a convenient substitute for the adjective 'Antillean' to designate a cultural type. The author applies the term to the original sedentary people of the West Indies, as distinguished from the Carib." The incident to which reference is made is described in Select Letters of Columbus (#5), p. 28. It is perhaps worth while to note that Peter Martyr (tr. MacNutt, i. 66, 81) says that taino signifies "a virtuous man." The word carib, caniba, is the source of our cannibal. It is possible that it means "man-eater" and is of Taino origin. Columbus, in the Journal of the first voyage (tr. Bourne, p. 223), is authority for the statement that "Carib" is the Hispaniolan form of the name. Im Thurn (p. 163) says that the Guiana Carib call themselves Carinya, which would seem to show that the word is an autonym, in which case it may mean, as Herrera says (III. v), "valiant." It is rather curious, if the insular Carib were the inveterate cannibals the earlier writers make them to be, that those of the mainland should have held the practice in abhorrence, for which we have Humboldt's statement, Foyage (tr. Ross, ii. 413).

3. A term of some interest is cacique, which is generally regarded as Haitian in origin, being, says Peter Martyr (tr. MacNutt, i. 82) their word for "king." Bastian, however, affirms that it is Arabic (ii. 293, note):*" Das Wort Cazique ist nicht amerikanisch, sino arabigo, usado entre los alarabes de Africa en el Reyno de Mazagan, con el qual nombran al principal y cabegas de los aduares, como tambien le nombran Xeque (meint Simon)."

4. The literature of the discovery is summarized by Beuchat, " Bibliographic," ch. iv. Christopher Columbus's Letters and Jour- nal, tr. Major, Markham, and Bourne, are here quoted.

5. The question of Amazons (cf. infra, Ch. IX, i), is a curious commingling of Old and New World myth, with, perhaps, some foundation in primitive custom, especially linguistic. Thus Beuchat, p. 509 (citing Raymond Breton and Lucien Adam; cf. also Ballet, citing du Tertre, pp. 398-99), states that the Caribs of the Isles had separate vocabularies, in part at least, for men and women, and that the women's speech contained a majority of Arawak words. This argument should not be pushed too far, however, for there are a number of South American languages with well-differentiated man-tongue and woman-tongue, where a similar origin of the difference is not shown. On his first voyage Columbus (letters to de Santangel and Sanchez), though he did not meet them, heard of "ferocious men, eaters of human flesh, wearing their hair long like women." On the second voyage as described by Chanca in his "Letter to the Chapter of Seville" (Select Letters) the Caribs were encountered and found to be holding in slavery many Tamo women: "In their attacks upon the neighbouring islands, these people capture as many of the women as they can, especially those who are young and beautiful, and keep them as concubines; and so great a number do they carry off, that in fifty houses no men were to be seen" (p. 31). It is added that the Caribs ate the children born of these captive women (a custom ascribed also to some South American cannibalistic tribes) ; but as it is said in the same connexion that captive boys were not devoured until they grew up, "for they say that the flesh of boys and women is not good to eat," the story is scarcely plausible. Herrera repeats that the Caribs ate no women, but kept them as slaves, in association with the statement that the natives of Dominica ate a friar, and dying of a flux caused by his flesh, gave over their cannibalism. These stories seem to point to a ritualistic element in the cannibalism, for to the Carib the flesh of warriors was the only man's meat. Of course, in the notion of Amazons there was an element of myth as well as of custom, and the myth was certainly known to Columbus, if we may trust the authenticity (and there is small reason to doubt it) of the paragraph with which Ramon Pane's narrative is introduced. For the myth in question see supra, pp. 3132, and cf. Pane, chh. iii-v.

6. The story of the search for the Fountain of Youth and of the colony of Antillean Indians in Florida is to be found in Fontaneda, pp. 17-19. The influence of Antillean culture has been traced well to the north of Florida, where it may have been extended by the pre-Muskhogean population; see also Herrera, III. v.

7. The story of Hathvey, or Hatuey, is given by Fewkes [b], pp. 211-12, and by Joyce [a], p. 244; its source is Las Casas [a], III. xxv.

8. West Indian idolatry, called Zemiism, is earliest described in the passage attributed to Christopher Columbus (Fernando Columbus, ch. Ixi); other authorities here quoted are Benzoni, pp. 78-80; Peter Martyr, "First Decade," ix (tr. MacNutt, i. 167-78); Ramon Pane, ch. xix-xxiv (tr. Pinkerton, xii. 87-89); and Las Casas [b], chh. clxvi-vii; cf. also Fewkes, especially [b], [e], Joyce [a], and Beuchat.

9. The most interesting artifacts from the Antilles are the stone rings, triangles, and elbows, which must be regarded as certainly ritualistic in character, and probably as used in fertility rites. This is not only indicated by Columbus and Ramon Pane, but is supported by numerous analogies. Ramon Pane (ch. xix) says: "The stone cemis are of several sorts: some there are which, they say, the physicians take out of the body of the sick, and those they look upon as best to help women in labour. Others there are that speak, which are shaped like a long turnip, with the leaves long and extended, like the shrub-bearing capers. Those leaves, for the most part, are like those of the elm. Others have three points, and they think they cause the yucca to thrive." It is perhaps not far-fetched to see in the triangular stones analogues of the mountain-man images of the Tlaloque in Mexico, or of the similar images from South America, certainly used in connexion with rain ceremonies. Very likely separate forms were employed for different plants, as maize or yucca. The stone rings, again, could very reasonably be those which were supposed to help women in labour, as seems to have been the case with the analogous rings and yokes from Yucatan (see Fewkes, 25 ARBE, pp. 259-61). Even if the two types of stones were combined, as seems altogether likely, at least for magic and divination, there is congruity in the relationship of both types to fertility, animal and vegetable respectively. Serior J. J. Acosta has suggested that the Antillean stone rings represent the bodies, and the triangular stones the heads, of serpents; and this is not without plausibility in view of the frequency with which serpents are regarded as fertility emblems. It may be worth recalling, too, that an Antillean name for doctor, or medicine-man, signified "serpent."

10. There is no reason to assume any essential difference in character in the shamans or medicine-men of the North and South American Indians. In general, the lower the tribe in the scale of political organization, the more important is the shaman or doctor, and the more distinctly individual and the less tribal are the offices which he performs; as organization grows in social complexity, the function of priest emerges as distinct from that of doctor, the priest becoming the depository of ritual, and the doctor or shaman, on a somewhat lower level, attending the sick or practising magic and prophecy. Apparently in the Antilles the two offices were on the way to differ- entiation, if, indeed, they were not already distinct. The bohutis, buhuitihus, boii, or, as Peter Martyr latinizes, bovites of this region were evidently both doctors and priests. Certainly both Ramon Pane's and Peter Martyr's descriptions imply this; though there are some hints which would seem to point to a special class of ritual priests, who may or may not have been doctors, as when priests are said to act as mouthpieces of the cacique in giving oracles from hollow statues, or as when Martyr (following Pane) says that "only the sons of chiefs" are allowed to learn the traditional chants of the great ceremonials (p. 172). The term peaiman, applied to the shamans of the Guiana tribes, is, says im Thurn (p. 328), an Anglicized form of the Carib word puyai or peartzan. The peatman, im Thurn states, "is not simply the doctor, but also, in some sense, the priest or magician." As matter of fact, the priestly element is slight among the continental Caribs, their practice being pure shamanism; and Fewkes ([b], p. 54) says that they " still speak of their priests as cecisemi" a term clearly related to zemi. "The prehistoric Porto Ricans," he says again (ib. p. 59), "had a well-developed priesthood, called boii (serpents), mabouya, and bukiti, which are apparently dialect or other forms of the same word." It was in Porto Rico, of course, that Carib and Tamo elements were most mixed. Brett [a], p. 363, in a note, derives the word piai from Carib puiai, which, he says, is in Ackawoi piatsan; while the Arawak use semecihi, and the Warau wisidaa, for the same functionary. Certainly the resemblance of boye and puiai, and of zemi and semecihi, or ceci-semi, indicates identities of origin, though the particular meanings are not altogether the same.

11. Little is preserved of Antillean myth, and that little is contained almost wholly in the narrative of Ramon Pane. The authorities here quoted are [Ramon Pane, chh. i, ix-xi, ii-vii (tr. Pinkerton, xii) ; Peter Martyr (tr. MacNutt, i. 167-70); Benzoni; and Ling Roth, in JAI xvi. 264-65. Stoddard gives free versions of several of the tales.

12. Peter Martyr, loc. cit. (quoting pp. 166-67, 172-76).

13. Gomara [a], ch. xxvii, p. 173, ed. Vedia (tr. Fewkes [b], pp. 66-67); cf. Benzoni, pp. 79-82; Las Casas [b], ch. clxvii. The plate representing the Earth Spirit ceremony is taken from (cf. Fewkes [b], Plate IX) Picart, The Religious Ceremonies and Customs of the Several Nations of the known World, London, 1731-37, Plate No. 78.

14. Im Thurn, pp. 335~3 8 ; cf. Fewkes [e], p. 355.

15. Ramon Pane, chh. xiv, xxv; Gomara [a], ch. xxxiii, pp. 175- 76, ed. Vedia, gives supplementary information.

16. Authorities cited for Carib lore are Columbus, Select Letters t pp. 29-37; im Thurn, pp. 192, 217, 222; Fewkes [b], pp. 27, 217-20, 68; Ballet, citing du Tertre and others, pp. 42122, 433-38, 40001; Davies, cited by Fewkes [b], pp. 60, 65; Currier, citing la Borde, pp. 508-09.

Index