CHAPTER I

Produced by Clare Graham & Marc D'Hooghe at Free Literature

THE MYTHOLOGY OF ALL RACES

_IN THIRTEEN VOLUMES_

LOUIS HERBERT GRAY, A.M., PH.D., EDITOR

GEORGE FOOT MOORE, A.M., D.D., LL.D., CONSULTING EDITOR

LATIN-AMERICAN

BY

HARTLEY BURR ALEXANDER, PH.D.

PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA

VOLUME XI

BOSTON MARSHALL JONES COMPANY

M DCCCC XX

[Illustration: PLATE I.]

Top face of the monolith known as the "Dragon" or the "Great Turtle"

of Quirigua. This is one of the group of stelae and "altars" which

mark the ceremonial courts of this vanished Maya city (see Plate

XXIII); and is perhaps the master-work not only of Mayan, but of

aboriginal American art. The top of the stone here figured shows

a highly conventionalized daemon or dragon mask, surrounded by a

complication of ornament. The north and south (here lower and upper)

faces of the monument contain representations of divinities; on the

south face is a mask of the "god with the ornamented nose" (possibly

Ahpuch, the death god), and on the north, seated within the open mouth

of the Dragon, the teeth of whose upper jaw appear on the top face of

the monument, is carved a serene, Buddha-like divinity shown in Plate

XXV. The Maya date corresponding, probably, to 525 A. D. appears in

a glyphic inscription on the shoulder of the Dragon. The monument is

fully described by W. H. Holmes, _Art and Archaeology_, Vol. IV, No. 6.

TO

ALICE CUNNINGHAM FLETCHER

IN APPRECIATION OF HER INTERPRETATIONS OF AMERICAN INDIAN LIFE AND

LORE

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

In aim and plan the present volume is made to accord as nearly as

may be with the earlier-written volume on the mythology of the North

American Indians. Owing to divergence of the materials, some deviations

of method have been necessary, but in their main lines the two books

correspond in form as they are continuous in matter. In each case

the author has aimed primarily at a descriptive treatment, following

regional divisions, and directed to essential conceptions rather than

to exhaustive classification; and in each case it has been, not the

specialist in the field, but the scholar with kindred interests and the

reader of broadly humane tastes whom the author has had before him.

The difficulties besetting the composition of both books have been

analogous, growing chiefly from the vast diversities of the sources

of material; but these difficulties are decidedly greater for the

Latin-American field. The matter of spelling is one of the more

immediate. In general, the author has endeavoured to adhere to such

of the rules given in Note 1 of _Mythology of All Races_, Vol. X (pp.

267-68), as may be applicable, seeking the simplest plausible English

forms and continuing literary usage wherever it is well established,

both for native and for Spanish names (as _Montezuma, Cortez_).

Consistency is pragmatically impossible in such a matter; but it is

hoped that the foundational need, that of identification, is not evaded.

The problem of an appropriate bibliography has proven to be of the

hardest. To the best of the author's belief, there exists, aside from

that here given, no bibliography aiming at a systematic classification

of the sources and discussions of the mythology of the Latin-American

Indians, as a whole. There are, indeed, a considerable number of

special bibliographies, regional in character, for which every student

must be grateful; and it is hoped that not many of the more important

of these have failed of inclusion in the bibliographical division

devoted to "Guides"; but for the whole field, the appended bibliography

is pioneer work, and subject to the weaknesses of all such attempts.

The principles of inclusion are: (1) All works upon which the text of

the volume directly rests. These will be found cited in the _Notes_,

where are also a few references to works cited for points of an

adventitious character, and therefore not included in the general

bibliography. (2) A more liberal inclusion of English and Spanish than

of works in other languages, the one for accessibility, the other for

source importance. (3) An effort to select only such works as have

material directly pertinent to the mythology, not such as deal with

the general culture, of the peoples under consideration,--a line most

difficult to draw. In respect to bibliography, it should be further

stated that it is the intent to enter the names of Spanish authors in

the forms approved by the rules of the Real Academia, while it has not

seemed important to follow other than the English custom in either text

or notes. It is certainly the author's hope that the labour devoted

to the assembling of the bibliography will prove helpful to students

generally, and it is his belief that those wishing an introduction

to the more important sources for the various regions will find of

immediate help the select bibliographies given in the _Notes_, for each

region and chapter.

The illustrations should speak for themselves. Care has been taken

to reproduce works which are characteristic of the art as well as of

the mythic conceptions of the several peoples; and since, in the more

civilized localities, architecture also is significantly associated

with mythic elements, a certain number of pictures are of architectural

subjects.

It remains to express the numerous forms of indebtedness which pertain

to a work of the present character. Where they are a matter of

authority, it is believed that the references to the _Notes_ will be

found fully to cover them; and where illustrations are the subject,

the derivation is indicated on the tissues. In the way of courtesies

extended, the author owes recognition to staff-members of the libraries

of Harvard and Northwestern Universities, to the Peabody Museum, the

Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the American Museum of Natural History, and

the Museum of the University of Nebraska. His personal obligations are

due to Professor Frank S. Philbrick, of the Northwestern University

Law School, and to the Assistant Curator of the Academy of Pacific

Coast History, Dr. Herbert I. Priestley, for valuable suggestions

anent the bibliography, and to Dr. Hiram Bingham, of the Yale Peruvian

Expedition, for his courtesy in furnishing for reproduction the

photographs represented by Plates XXX and XXXVIII. His obligations to

the editor of the series are, it is trusted, understood.

The manuscript of the present volume was prepared for the printer by

November of 1916. The ensuing outbreak of war delayed publication

until the present hour. In the intervening period a number of works

of some importance appeared, and the author has endeavoured to

incorporate as much as was essential of this later criticism into the

body of his work, a matter difficult to make sure. The war also has

been responsible for the editor's absence in Europe during the period

in which the book has been put through the press, and the duty of

oversight has fallen upon the author who is, therefore, responsible for

such editorial delinquencies as may be found.

HARTLEY BURR ALEXANDER.

LINCOLN, NEBRASKA,

November 17, 1919.

CONTENTS

PAGE

AUTHOR'S PREFACE. vii

INTRODUCTION. i

CHAPTER I. THE ANTILLES. 15

I The Islanders. 15

II The First Encounters. 18

III Zemiism. 21

IV Taïno Myths. 28

V The Areitos. 32

VI Carib Lore. 36

CHAPTER II. MEXICO. 41

I Middle America. 41

II Conquistadores. 44

III The Aztec Pantheon. 49

IV The Great Gods. 57

1 Huitzilopochtli. 58

2 Tezcatlipoca. 61

3 Quetzalcoatl. 66

4 Tlaloc and Chalchiuhtlicue. 71

V The Powers of Life. 74

VI The Powers of Death. 79

CHAPTER III. MEXICO. (_continued_) 85

I Cosmogony. 85

II The Four Suns. 91

III The Calendar and its Cycles. 96

IV Legendary History. 105

V Aztec Migration-Myths. 111

VI Surviving Paganism. 118

CHAPTER IV. YUCATAN. 124

I The Maya. 124

II Votan, Zamna, and Kukulcan. 131

III Yucatec Deities. 136

IV Rites and Symbols. 142

V The Maya Cycles. 146

VI The Creation. 152

CHAPTER V. CENTRAL AMERICA. 156

I Quiché and Cakchiquel. 156

II The Popul Vuh. 159

III The Hero Brothers. 168

IV The Annals of the Cakchiquel. 177

V Honduras and Nicaragua. 183

CHAPTER VI. THE ANDEAN NORTH. 187

I The Cultured Peoples of the Andes. 187

II The Isthmians. 189

III El Dorado. 194

IV Myths of the Chibcha. 198

V The Men from the Sea. 204

CHAPTER VII. THE ANDEAN SOUTH. 210

I The Empire of the Incas. 210

II The Yunca Pantheons. 220

III The Myths of the Chincha. 227

IV Viracocha and Tonapa. 232

V The Children of the Sun. 242

VI Legends of the Incas. 248

CHAPTER VIII. THE TROPICAL FORESTS: THE ORINOCO AND GUIANA. 253

I Lands and Peoples. 253

II Spirits and Shamans. 256

III How Evils Befell Mankind. 261

IV Creation and Cataclysm. 268

V Nature and Human Nature. 275

CHAPTER IX. THE TROPICAL FORESTS: THE AMAZON AND BRAZIL. 281

I The Amazons. 281

II Food-Makers and Dance-Masks. 287

III Gods, Ghosts, and Bogeys. 295

IV Imps, Were-Beasts, and Cannibals. 300

V Sun, Moon, and Stars. 304

VI Fire, Flood, and Transformations. 311

CHAPTER X. THE PAMPAS TO THE LAND OF FIRE. 316

I The Far South. 316

II El Chaco and the Pampeans. 318

III The Araucanians. 324

IV The Patagonians. 331

V The Fuegians. 338

NOTES. 347

BIBLIOGRAPHY. 381

ILLUSTRATIONS

FULL PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS

PLATE PAGE

I The Dragon of Quirigua--Photogravure. Frontispiece

II Antillean Triangular Stone Images. 24

III Antillean Stone Ring. 29

IV Dance in Honor of the Earth Goddess, Haiti. 35

V Aztec Goddess, probably Coatlicue. 47

VI Tutelaries of the Quarters, Codex 56

xx Ferjérváry-Mayer--Coloured.

VII Coyolxauhqui, Xochipilli, and Xiuhcoatl. 60

VIII Tezcatlipoca, Codex Borgia--Coloured. 65

IX Quetzalcoatl, Macuilxochitl, Huitzilopochtli, 71

xx Codex Borgia--Coloured.

X Mask of Xipe Totec. 76

XI Mictlantecutli, God of Death. 81

XII Heavenly Bodies, Codex Vaticanus B and 88

xx Codex Borgia--Coloured.

XIII Ends of Suns, or Ages of the World, Codex 95

xx Vaticanus A--Coloured.

XIV Aztec Calendar Stone. 101

XV Temple of Xochicalco. 106

XVI Section of the Tezcucan "Map Tlotzin"--Coloured. 113

XVII Interior of Chamber, Mitla. 118

XVIII Temple 3, Ruins of Tikal. 127

XIX Map of Yucatan Showing Location of Maya Cities. 130

XX Bas-relief Tablets, Palenque. 136

XXI Bas-relief Lintel, Menché, Showing Priest 144

xx and Penitent.

XXII "Serpent Numbers," Codex Dresdensis--Coloured. 152

XXIII Ceremonial Precinct, Quirigua. 160

XXIV Image in Mouth of the Dragon of Quirigua. 168

XXV Stela 12, Piedras Negras. 179

XXVI Amulet in the Form of a Vampire. 190

XXVII Colombian Goldwork. 196

XXVIII Mother Goddess and Ceremonial Dish, Colombia. 200

XXIX Vase Painting of Balsa, Truxillo. 206

XXX Machu Picchu. 213

XXXI Monolith, Chavin de Huantar. 218

XXXII Nasca Vase, Showing Multi-Headed Deity. 222

XXXIII Nasca Deity, in Embroidery--Coloured. 226

XXXIV Nasca Vase, Showing Sky Deity. 230

XXXV Monolithic Gateway, Tiahuanaco. 234

XXXVI Plaque, probably Representing Viracocha. 236

XXXVII Vase Painting from Pachacamac--Coloured. 240

XXXVIII Temple of the Windows, Machu Picchu. 248

XXXIX Carved Seats and Metate. 265

XL Vase from the Island of Marajó. 286

XLI Brazilian Dance Masks. 294

XLII Trophy Head, from Ecuador. 303

ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT

FIGURE PAGE

1 Chart showing Culture Sequences in Mexico and Peru. 367

2 Figure from a Potsherd, Calchaqui Region. 369

INTRODUCTION

There is an element of obvious incongruity in the use of the term

"Latin American" to designate the native Indian myths of Mexico and

of Central and South America. Unfortunately, we have no convenient

geographical term which embraces all those portions of America which

fell to Spanish and Portuguese conquerors, and in default of this,

the term designating their culture, Latin in character, has come into

use--aptly enough when its application is to transplanted Iberian

institutions and peoples, but in no logical mode relating to the

aborigines of these regions. More than this, there are no aboriginal

unities of native culture and ideas which follow the divisions made

by the several Caucasian conquests of the Americas. It is primarily

as consequence of their conquest by Spaniards that Mexico and Central

America fall with the southern continent in our thought; from the point

of view of their primitive ethnology there is little evidence (at least

for recent times)[1] of southern influence until Yucatan and Guatemala

are passed. There are, to be sure, striking resemblances between the

Mexican and Andean aboriginal civilizations; and there are, again,

broad similarities between the ideas and customs of the less advanced

tribes of the two continents, such that we may correctly infer a

certain racial character as typical of all American Indians; but amid

these similarities there are grouped differences which, as between the

continents, are scarcely less distinctive than are their fauna and

flora,--say, calumet and eagle's plume as against blowgun and parrot's

feather,--and these hold level for level: the Amazonian and the Inca

are as distinctively South American as the Mississippian and the Aztec

are distinctively North American.

Were the divisions in a treatment of American Indian myth to follow

the rationale of pre-Columbian ethnography,[2] the key-group would

be found in the series of civilized or semi-civilized peoples of the

mainly mountainous and plateau regions of the western continental

ridge, roughly from Cancer to Capricorn, or with outlying spurs from

about 35º North (Zuñi and Hopi) to near 35º South (Calchaqui-Diaguité).

Within this region native American agriculture originated; and along

with agriculture were developed the arts of civilization in the forms

characteristic of America; while from the several centres of the

key-group agriculture and attendant arts passed on into the plains and

forests regions and the great alluvial valleys of the two continents

and into the archipelago which lies between them. In each continent

there is a region--the Boreal and the Austral--beyond the boundaries

of the native agriculture, and untouched by the arts of the central

civilizations, yet showing an unmistakable community of ideas, of

which (primitive and vague as they are) recurrent instances are to be

found among the intervening groups. Thus the plat and configuration of

autochthonous America divides into cultural zones that are almost those

of the hemispherical projection, and into altitudes that are curiously

parallel to the continental altitudes: the higher civilizations of

the plateaux, the more or less barbarous cultures of the unstable

tribes of the great river basins, and the primitive development of

the wandering hordes of the frigid coasts. The primitive stage may be

assumed to be the foundational one throughout both continents, and it

is virtually repeated in the least advanced groups of all regions;

the intermediate stage (except in such enigmatical groups as that of

the North-West Coast Indians of North America) appears to owe much to

definite acculturation as a consequence of the spread of the arts and

industries developed by the most advanced peoples. Moreover, the outer

unities of mode of life are reflected by inner communities of thought;

for there are unmistakable kinships of idea, not only throughout

the civilized group, but also in the whole range of the regions

affected by its arts; while underlying these and outcropping at the

poles, there is a definable stratum of virtually identical primitive

thought. Nevertheless, these unities are cut across by differences,

partly environmental and partly historical in origin, which give,

as said above, distinctive character to the parallel groups of the

two continents. One might, indeed, say that the cultural division is

twinned, north and south,--with a certain primacy, as of elder birth

and clear superiority in the northern groups; for, on the whole, the

Maya is superior to the Inca, just as the Iroquois and Sioux are

superior to Carib and Araucanian, and the Eskimo to the Fuegian.

Such, in loose form, is the native configuration of American culture

and hence of native American thought, and without question a desirable

mode of treating the latter would be to follow this natural chart.

Nevertheless, there are reasons which fully justify, in the study of

native ideas, the bringing together in a single treatment of all the

materials relating to the peoples of Latin America. The most obvious

of these reasons is the unity of the descriptive literature, in its

earlier and primary works almost wholly Spanish. It is not merely

that such writers as Las Casas, Acosta, Herrera, and Gómara pass

ubiquitously from region to region of the Spanish conquests, now north,

now south, in the course of their narratives; it is rather that a

certain colouristic harmony is derived from what might be termed the

linguistic prejudices of their tongue, which, therefore, they share

with those Spanish chroniclers whose field of description is limited

to some one region. The mere fact that the ideas of an Indian nation

are first described by a sixteenth century Spaniard--friar, bishop, or

cavalier--gives to them the flavour of their translation and context,

and thus establishes a sort of community between all groups of ideas

so described. Nor need this be matter for regret: primitive thought,

with its burning concreteness and its lack of relational expression,

is as truly untranslatable into analytical languages as poetry is

untranslatable; and it is, on the whole, good fortune to have, as it

were, but one linguistic colour cast upon so large a body of aboriginal

ideas.

Further--what may not be to the liking of the ethnologist, but is

certainly of high zest to the lover of romance--the Spanish colour is

quite as much in the nature of imagination as in the hue of expression.

No book on Latin American mythology could be complete without

description of those truly Latinian fables which the discoverers

brought with them to the New World, and there, wedding them to native

traditions (ill-heard and fabulously repeated), soon created such a

realm of gorgeous marvel as glamoured the age with fantasy and set the

coolest heads to mad adventure. In such names as Antilles, Brazil,

the Amazon, Old World myths are fixed in New World geography; and

beyond these there is the whole series of fantastic tales with which

the Spaniard, in a sort of imaginative munificence, has enriched the

literature and the romantic resources of this world of ours. The

Fountain of Eternal Youth, the Seven Cities of Cibola, the Island of

the Amazons and the marvellous virtues of the Amazon Stone, El Dorado

("the Gilded Man"), the treasure cities of Manoa and Omagua, the lost

empire of the Gran Moxo and the Gran Paytiti, Patagonian giants, and

"men whose heads do grow between their shoulders," and finally, most

wide-spread of all, the miracles of the robed and bearded white man

who, long ago, had come to teach the Indian a new way of life and a

purer worship and had left the cross to be his sign, in whom no pious

mind could see other than the blessed Saint Thomas: all these were

in part a freight of the caravels, and they represent collectively

a chapter second to none in mythopoesy. There is no match for this

cargo of imported fantasy in the parts of America colonized by the

English and the French. This, however, need not be accredited merely

to cooler blood and calmer race: the North American colonies belong to

the seventeenth century, a good hundred years after the Spaniards had

completed their most golden conquests, and for the Spaniard, no less

than for the others, the hour of intoxication and extravagance had

by then gone by--leaving its flamboyant tones to warm the colours of

succeeding times. Thus it is that Latin American myth is in no faint

degree truly Latinian.

But while there is a certain Old World seasoning in Latin American

myth, native traditions are, of course, the substantial material of the

study. This material is striking and various. It embraces the usual

substrata of demoniac beliefs and animistic credulities, and above

these such elaborate formations as the Aztec and Maya pantheons, with

their amazing astral and calendric interpretations, or the enigmatic

and fervid religion of Peru. Many of the stories are little more than

vocal superstitions; others, such as the conquering of death in the

_Popul Vuh_, the Brazilian tale of the release of the imprisoned night,

or the superb Surinam legend of Maconaura and Anuanaïtu, will compare,

both for dramatic power and subtle suggestion, with the best that

the world can show. There is, of course, the constant difficulty of

deciding where myth clearly emerges from the misty realm of folk-lore,

and, at the other extreme, where it is succeeded by science and

religion; but this difficulty is more theoretic than practical: in its

central character mythology is present wherever there are animating

gods operant in the body of nature, and myth is present wherever

spirits or deities are shown as dramatically interacting causes. With

a few possible exceptions (the possibility being probably but the

expression of our ignorance), all American Indians are mythopoets,

whose mythology is characterized in characterizing their beliefs.

The practical problem of handling and apportioning the subject-matter

is similar to that presented in the case of North America, and rather

more difficult. In the first place, it were idle to undertake the mere

narration of stones and superstitions without some delineation of the

conditions of the life and culture of those who make them; frequently,

the whole relevance of the tale is to the manner of life. In the next

place, the feasible mode of apportionment, by regional divisions, is

made difficult not only by the vastness of some of the regions, but

even more so by the unevenness of culture, and hence of the range of

ideas. If the lines were drawn on the scale of Old World studies,

Mexico (Nahua and Maya) and Peru would each deserve a volume; and the

proportionately slight attention which they receive in the present work

is due partly to the need of giving reasonable space to other regions,

partly to the fact that the myths of these fallen empires are already

represented by an accessible literature. Still a third problem has to

do with the order in which the matters should be presented. From the

point of view of native affinities, the logical step from the Antilles

is to the Orinoco and Guiana region (that is, from Chapter I to Chapter

VIII).[3] But since, in beginning with the Antilles, one is really

following the course of discovery--seeing, as it were, with Spanish

eyes--the natural continuation is on to Mexico and Peru, and thence

to the more slowly uncovered regions of central South America. This

procedure, also, follows a certain bibliographical trend: the relative

importance of Spanish authors is much less for the latter chapters of

the book, and the sources of material, in general, are of later origin.

Finally, a word might be said with respect to interpretation. No

matter how conscientiously one may aim at straight narration, the

mere need for coherence will compel some interpreting; while every

translation is, in its degree, an interpretation (and one literally

impossible). Besides and beyond all this, there are the prepossessions

of the recorders to be taken into account--honest men who interpret

according to their lights. There are the Biblical prepossessions of

the early Padres, for whom the Tower of Babel and the Dispersion were

recent and real events: granting a Noachian Deluge of the thoroughness

which they had in mind, nothing could be more rational than were

their readings of aboriginal legends of events of a kindred nature,

or than their speculations as to what sons of Shem the Indians might

be. There are the traditionary visions of migratory descendants of the

Lost Tribes, of far-wandering Buddhist monks, of sea-faring Orientals,

and forgotten Atlantideans; and there is the wonderful Euhemerism of

the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg (ever the more admirable in the more

reading)--neither the first nor the last of his tribe, but assuredly

the most gifted of them all. There are, again, the theological

biases of missionaries, for whom the devil is seldom far and God is

generally near; and there are the no less ingrained prejudices of

the anthropologists who serenely Tylorize and fetishize the most

recalcitrant materials, and of the philologists who solarize and

astralize because the model was once set for them. America has proven

an abundant field for the illustration of all these methods of reading

the riddle of man's fancy; and it is scarcely to be desired that one

should report the matters without some reflection of the colourations.

But, in sooth, how could myth be myth apart from meaning?

Which leads (by no devious routing of reflection) to some consideration

of the meaning of mythology and of our interest in it. Such interest

may be of any of several types. A first, and still persistent,

interest, and one to which we owe, for America, from Ramon Pane onward,

more actual material than to any other, is the desire of the Christian

missionary to discover in the native mind those points of approach and

elements of community which will best enable him to spread the faith

of Christendom. In many cases, of course, the missionary is seized

with a purely speculative zeal for recording facts, but it is usually

possible in such records to detect the influence of the impulse which

first brought him into the field,--and which, it may be added, makes

of his services a matter for the gratitude of all who follow him. A

second interest, which is often not sharply divorced from the first,

as instanced in Missionary Brett's poetizing of the myths of the

Guiana Indians,[4] is the aesthetic and imaginative. What classical

mythology has done for the art and poetry of Christian Europe all men

know: Dante and Milton, Botticelli and Michelangelo are only less its

debtors than are Homer and Phidias. Further, the Renaissance curiosity,

with its passion for the antique gems and heathen gods whose forms so

stimulated its own expressions, was at its height when America was

discovered and conquered; and it is small wonder that that interest was

transformed, where the marvel of the New World was in question, into a

wave of American exotism which rose to its crest in the humanitarian

enthusiasm of the eighteenth century.[5] In our own day this interest

is continuing, more soberly but not less fruitfully, in a deliberate

effort on the part of artists, of poets, and of musicians to discover

the elements of lasting beauty in the native arts and mythic themes.

From a certain point of view there is a peril in the aesthetic

interest: most investigators consciously or unconsciously possess

it, and most recorders of native myths consciously or unconsciously

dress their materials with the suaver forms of expression which the

cultivated languages of Europe have developed. There is, in other

words, some untruth to aboriginal thought in the desire to find or

inject art where the original motive was realistic, or, if aesthetic,

governed by a taste foreign to our own. On the other hand, we recognize

readily enough that the real creative gain, in an artistic sense,

must come from an amalgamation, and with such an example of artistic

achievement through amalgamation as is afforded by the Renaissance, we

can but hope that the more intimate adoption of the ideas and motives

of American Indian art into our own aesthetic consciousness may yet

result in an American Renaissance no less notable.

A third interest in American mythology is that of the anthropologists,

by whom the domain is today most cultivated. Here the foundation

is scientific curiosity and the modes are those of the natural and

historical sciences. This type of interest, of course, determines its

own problems and methods. For example, to it we owe most of the exact

recording and minute analysis of materials: the preservation of texts

in the native tongues, and the careful application of ethnological and

archaeological observations to their interpretation. Naturally, the

key-problem here is of the origin and distribution of the American

Indian peoples, and the reconstruction of their history, both physical

and ideational,--wherein recent advances have been veritably in the

nature of strides. Along with this problem of distribution and genesis

there has co-existed the complementary question of the influence of

nature (human and environmental) upon the forms of expression--a

question to which one might ascribe three facets, the philological,

the sociological, and the more strictly bionomic, with its strong

Darwinian leanings. Ultimately the two complemental problems resolve

into an effort to read human nature, as human nature is reflected in

its express reactions to the complex world by which it is modified

even while it offers a conserving resistance, born of the strength of

its traditions and of racial solidarity. This means, at the bottom, an

interest in human psychology.

It is here that the anthropological interest in mythology passes over

into the philosophical. Philosophy strives to achieve, as it were, a

generalized autobiography of the human mind. It starts, inevitably,

with psychology, and with those elemental unities of experience which

our senses (inner and outer) determine for us; it goes on to try to

discover the range and fullness of meaning of all the variations of

human experience. Philosophers are interested in mythology, therefore,

primarily from a psychological standpoint: they are interested in

reading the mind's complexion, as mythopoesy reflects it; in analyzing

out the images of sense in human thought, the images of instinct, of

kind and kin, of speech and number; and again in reviewing the natural

reactions of the human spirit to the visible and sensible world,

with its seasons and cycles and evident metamorphoses,--reactions

which start, apparently, with a dreamy consciousness of the fluid and

incoherent character of an outer, man-environing world, and culminate

in a sense of the allegory and drama of things physical, and the

discovery of a thinking self, still hazy as to its powers and its

limitations. The biographic tale is a long one; it begins in savagery

and continues on into the highest civilization; it is today unfinished,

and so long as man lives and thinks must continue unfinished; but it is

not without form, and its continuities become the more obvious with the

extension of our knowledge of men.

It should be added that each of the interests which have been named

shares in or leads to that final interest which is most appropriate

to all, namely, a common concern for human welfare. The missionary

interest is obviously actuated by this from the very beginning, and,

as applied to America, it has produced (in Las Casas and his many

notable successors) a truly wonderful series of apostolic figures--in

themselves a moving revelation of the possibilities of human nature.

Hardly less striking is the humanitarianism which has accompanied

the aesthetic interest--one need but mention Montaigne's sympathetic

curiosity, Rousseau, fantastic in his eighteenth century credulity,

Chateaubriand, with his "epic of the man of nature," or Fenimore

Cooper's idealization of the savage chivalrous,--while the curiosity of

the anthropologist and the philosopher, as must all honest curiosity

about things human, leads at the last to understanding and sympathy,

and ultimately to an active desire to preserve the manifest good which

enlightens every chapter in the narrative of human progress.

Finally, it is perhaps worth observing that America affords a field of

truly unique profit for all of these interests. The long isolation

of its inhabitants from the balance of mankind, the variety of the

forms and levels of their native achievement, the intrinsic value

to humanity at large of what they did achieve, both in material and

ideal modes, all unite to give to the races of the New Hemisphere an

almost other-world distinction from the Old World peoples from whose

midst (in some remote day) they doubtless sprang. It is true that the

resemblances between the modes of life and the bent of thought in the

two Worlds are as striking and numerous as their divergences; but this

fact is in itself of the highest significance in that it emphasizes

that fundamental unity, spiritual as well as physical, which is of the

whole human brotherhood.

It is surely apparent that one book cannot satisfy all the interests

which have been here defined. It is possible, however, that a

description which should show what, in the main, are the materials to

be found and how they are distributed with reference to accessible

sources of study might well contribute to all. Nothing more ambitious

than this is in the plan of the present work.

CHAPTER I

THE ANTILLES

I. THE ISLANDERS[6]

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 archipelagos,

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 Taïno[7] (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 containing 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 Taïno peoples; some, indeed, obtained a foothold

here, while beyond, in Hispaniola, one of the five caciques[8] 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 Taïno, 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 Taïno peoples, they were already

advanced in the arts of agriculture, pottery-making, weaving, and

stone-working, combined with some knowledge of metals. Furthermore,

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 Borinqueño 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[9]

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 new-found 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 Taïno 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 Española 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[10] 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 Taïno 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 León partly

brought and partly found the story of the Fountain of Youth,[11] 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,[12]

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[13]

The 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.[14] 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."

[Illustration: PLATE II.]

Antillean triangular carved stones, lateral and top views. In addition

to the grotesque masks, limbs are clearly indicated. For reference to

their probable significance, see pages 23-24 and note 14. After 25

_ARBE_, Plates XLVI and XLIX.

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 _zemes_, which

he honours with particular care. Their ancestors gave to the supreme

and eternal Being two names, Iocauna and Guamaonocon. But this supreme

Being was himself brought forth by a mother, who has five names,

Attabeira, Mamona, Guacarapita, Iella, 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"), Iermaoguacar, 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 are 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],[15] 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. TAÏNO MYTHS[16]

"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.

[Illustration: 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 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

résumé, 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 (_caracol_,

"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 (_opia_) 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

spirit-world.

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

"The Spaniards," says Peter Martyr,[17] "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 Taïno culture, was the ceremony in honour of

the Earth Goddess. This ceremony, as celebrated by the Haitians, is

described by both Benzoni and Gómara with some detail. Gómara's account

is as follows:[18]

"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 Gómara 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 Taïno 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 Iocauna, 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.

[Illustration: PLATE IV.]

Dance, or Areito, of the Haitian Indians in honor of the Earth

Goddess. The ceremony is described by both Benzoni and Gómara, the

latter's description being quoted in this volume, pages 33-34. After

the drawing in Picart, _The Religious Ceremonies and Customs of the

Several Nations of the known World_, London, 1731-37, Plate No. 78.

That the Taïno 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_.[19]

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:[20]

"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 Gómara, that a song

was formed commemorating it, sung as an _areito_ in a ceremonial dance.

VI. CARIB LORE[21]

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 Taïno, 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 Taïno women by the

leg-bands, fastened below the knee and above the ankle, which caused

the leg-muscles 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 Taïno

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 Père 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 Taïno

_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.