Gua Ban Cesh as a volcano

[Miguel Sague Jr]

Tau My Relatives
In his RELACION ACERCA DE LAS ANTIGUEDADES DE LOS INDIOS, according to the Italian translation edited by Jose Juan Arrom, the monk Ramon Pane stated that the ancient Tainos believed in a female spirit called Gua Ban Cex (Ramon Pane 1494, Arrom 1974).
Because his description of Gua Ban Cex painted a picture of a rather violent entity with the power and inclination to cause all sorts of weather-related chaos for the Tainos she has often been associated by scholars with the hurricane and other torrential and destructive meteriological manifestations. I believe that this association is very accurate. In his 1992 work "Encuentro con la mitologia taina" Sebastian Robiou Lamarche comments: "Podia manifestarse una divinidad destructora: Guabancex...Guabancex, era en otras palabras, la deidad que producia las grandes lluvias destructoras, los fuertes vientos y los temibles huracanes." (Robiou Lamarche 1992).

And yet there is some evidence that indicates that the ancient Tainos may have perceived the spiritual concepts associated with violent natural manifestations from a more wholistic perspective. We in the Caney Circle suggest that Gua Ban Cex, rather than just representing rough weather, can represent almost any of a wide variety of destructive natural phenomena. She also represents earthquakes, of which there can be quite a lot in the extremely seismic region of the Caribbean. She also represents tidal waves and tsunamis, hail and from our point of view another extraordinarily powerful and prevalent natural phenomenon that prevails mostly in the eastern Caribbean, volcanoes.

In his website Lennox Honychurch.com the anthropologist Lennox Edward Honychurch, as part of an article "Island Cosmology" written based on years of study of Kalinago culture on the island of Dominica makes this assertion:

"The most definitive element of the landscape that represented Grenada and the islands to the north for the indigenous groups was the volcanic peak. So unusual were these high summits to the people of the delta region(meaning the Orinoco delta), that in the mythology of the Warao, Naparima Hill in southern Trinidad was considered to be a pillar holding up the sky on the edge of the Warao world (Wilbert 1993).

Coming from the flat river banks and delta region it was the volcanic peaks, rising out of the sea in a gently curving arc along their route northwards which became the main symbol in their mythic geography once they reached the islands. These peaks gave the islands life and they were the source of all the natural resources that the islands contained. The image of the volcano became the centerpiece for the cosmology of the successive waves of island-based tribes that followed the first agricultural and pottery making people now known as the Saladoid. From their arrival in the islands at the beginning of the Christian era, the volcano was represented in shell, stone and clay in the form of a religious object called a zemi. Because these particular zemies are cut, carved or moulded into the shape of the triangle of a volcanic peak, they are called 'three-pointers'.

The Saladoid had found a natural object with which to make these first "three-pointer" zemis of the volcano. In the waters around these islands lives the distinctive Strombus gigas or conch and its shell provided an image not just of single volcanic peaks as determined by Olsen (1974) but if studied carefully, the entire shell provides a rough three-dimentional map of the volcanic island cones of the Lesser Antilles. Not only have individual pieces of the points on the conch shell been found to have been cut off from the main shell and carved, but even when these are reproduced in stone or clay they are given a concave base which replicates the concave indentation underneath every conical peak on the conch shell. With the peaks on the conch representing the peaks of the islands then the giant opening of the mouth of the conch may have been interpreted as the bocas of the Orinoco River from which successive groups of indigenous islanders had come.

Once on the islands, these people were well aware of the power of the volcano."

The irony of a dominant geographic feature such as a volcano, whose surrounding landscape can be the most fertile in all the island, yet which can explode in a nightmare of all-consuming fury, was not lost on the early Arawakan ancestors. Certainly the fertility of the areas affected by ancient volcanic deposits must have made these ancestors create a connection in their minds between the volcano and the ever-fertile female Mother spirit. But at the same time a healthy respect must have developed for an entity that could only be described as the "mother nature" that you're not supposed to mess with.

I feel that using the projecting points of the conch shell to create these volcano images allowed the early pre-Taino immigrants in the islands to make the important psychic connection between the mother spirit, Ata Bey, who is identified with water(associated with sea water because sea water is the blood of Mother Earth, also, by extension, with the marine creature, the conch shell), and the destructive, conical fire-breathing beings that dotted many of the major islands in the Lesser Antilles. This connection between the Water Mother/Earth Mother and the volcano would prove logical only if these people saw the Earth Mother as possessing a dual face, one beneficient and the other one destructive. I trully believe that this was the case, recognizing in their mother spirit, as with any other important spiritual concept, the important element of complimentary duality which rules the whole universe; up/down, Life/Death, dark/light, creative/destructive.

I have remarked elsewhere that most of the three-pointer sculptures of the fully evolved Tainos that Columbus met in 1492 represent Yoka Hu, the male spirit of the yuca plant and of Life itself. I stand by that assertion. And yet there are a number of exceptions to that general rule which seem to adapt themselves to the three-pointer morphology and yet don't seem to represent Yoka Hu at all. Among these are the many zoomorphic(animal-shaped) three-pointers that also abound in the larger islands.

It is entirely possible that the conical shape of the original plain, undecorated three-pointers found in the smaller volcanic islands, fashined from conch-shell projections, which certaily can be reminicent of the cut-off pointed end of the (male) yuca tuber, could also, at other times, bring to mind the conical shape of a female human breast. If that was the case then some of these objects would represent female Gua Ban Cex instead of male Yoka Hu. That the three-pointers can represent Gua Ban Cex in the form of a volcano would then expand the understanding of this important deity from the purely weather-related entity recognized by most scholars to a more generalized nature spirit that represents ALL catastrophic natural phenomena, not just storms. In other words, she is ALL MOTHER NATURE.

A famous three-pointer discovered in the Dominican Republic and now housed at the Museo Arqueologico Regional, Altos De Chavon in D.R. is probably the epitomal example of this concept. The imagery on this cemi depicts a bulbous, gently swelling cone, tipped by what can only be interpreted as a human female nipple. From the top part of the cone there seems to descend the long winding body of a ferocious snake. The body of the reptile is depicted artistically curved in ondulating waves around the whole globular mass of the mammiform cone, its pointed tail wrapped around the areola of the upward-pointing nipple, its all-consuming, many-toothed maw, grimacing at the base. The image is clearly that of a volcanic eruption, the flow of the serpentine body is the stream of fiery lava or pyroclastic material descending down its sloped sides, eating everything in its path. It certainly presents us with a striking example of the awe-filled respect with which these ancient ancestors contemplated that female matriarch. It is to be remembered that the serpent has been identified by Eugenio Fernandez Mendez as one of the most iconic animal-totems of the Taino female mother spirit (Eugenio Fernandez Mendez, Art and Mythology of the Taino Indians of the Greater West Indies (San Juan, Puerto Rico: Ediciones El Cemi 1993), pp.18, 26).

Taino Ti
Miguel Sobaoko Koromo Sague