Tying the knot; The tradition of tying two sacred objects together in Taino culture

[Miguel Sague Jr]

Tau My Relatives
As many of you already are aware, we in the Caney Indigenous Spiritual Circle celebrate the Spring Equinox with a ceremony that includes the act of separating two traditinal Taino sculpted images which have been kept tied together throughout the winter season.

One of those two images is the sculptural item popularly known by scholars as a "stone collar". We in th Caney Circle call them Coa Hoops. Coa Hoops were obviously important elements of ancient Taino iconography. The Boricua scholar Eugenio Fernandez Memdez identified the Coa Hoop with the Taino Divine Female Spirit whom he called "GuaBanCex", using one of the many names by which the ancient Taino identified her. He also made a very distinct connection between this hoop-shaped image and snakes (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).
In fact it is true that if one looks at the form of a typical gracile variety stone collar one can image a coiled serpent much as Fernandez-Mendez suggests.

Because of this fact the scholar saw an identification between snakes and the Cosmic Mother spirit of the Tainos, a concept that fits well with the imagery of primordial female mother goddesses all over the world, including the goddess Coatlicue of the Aztecs, the goddess Tiamat of the Mesopotemians, The Snake Goddess of the Minoans, and many others.

Fernandez-Mendez further suggests that this snake entity is imaged on one of the Coa Hoops, which in fact bears what appears to be a sculpted rendition of a reptilian entity with hands, apparently holding up two disks. Fernandez Mendez suggests that these disks represent the twin sons of Ata Bey (or GuaBanCex, as he refers to her).

The shape of the Coa Hoop is ovoid and very closely suggests the form of a human uterus.

This uterine morphology more closely associates it to the fertility attributes of the Taino Mother Spirit. We suggest that the womb of Ata Bey is not only to be conceived as the origin place of Yoka Hu, her son as confirmed by the text of Ramon Pane's Relacion ( Ramon Pane, Relacion acerca de las antiguedades de los indios, ed Jose Juan Arrom (Mexico: Siglo Ventiuno, 1977), but in fact the origin place of all creation. This perception is borne out by the phraseology used in creation narratives of the Indigenous people of the Orinoco River. In the years between 1940 and the early 1960's the ethnographer Marc De Civrieux collected a sacred narration of the Makiritare Indigenous nation, a people who dwell on the banks of the Orinoco River of norhern South America. In the relating of this sacred story Civreux's informant makes a reference to the vaginal opening of a divine female who nurtures embryonic humanity in her womb. He refers to that opening by using the word "cave". (Selected abridged episodes from Marc de Civrieux, Watunna: Mitologia Makiritare (Caracas: Monte Avila Editores, C.A., 1970), translated, with an introduction and glossary, by David M. Guss as Wattuna: An Orinoco Creation Cycle (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1980)).
The use of the word "cave" to refer to the birth canal of a divine female is significant because "cave" is also a word used by the ancient Tainos, as witnessed by Pane, when they related the origin of many elements of creation, including the sun and the moon and also humans. It is evident that the use of the word "cave" in Taino sacred narrative is a reference to a divine birth canal inside the body of a Cosmic Mother. Because of that we infer that this mother is not only the mother of the divine male entity Yoka Hu but actually the mother of all that exists.It is important to note that later in the Makitirare narration this same divine mother character turns into a large water snake and, in the form of a snake, finally gives birth to humanity. This, again, harmonizes with Fernandez-Mendez identification between the Taino Mother Spirit and snakes. Most experts agree that the ancestors of the Taino originated among the Arawak-speaking tribes of the Orinoco river and so a comparison of traditional narratives told by the Tainos and the people of the Orinoco is relevant (Ricardo Alegria, An Introduction to Taino Culture and History: Contribution number 2 in the compendium “Taino, Pre-Columbian Art and Culture from the Caribbean”, pp. 21-22, commenting on Pane’s report on Taino culture: “Even with these abbreviations, it is evident from his reports that the Taino inherited an ancient and complex religious tradition from South America. Many authors have noted the similarities between the Antillean mythology as recorded by Pane and that of the tropical regions of South America, especially with regards to the creation of humankind, the origin of women, the divine twins, and the myth of the great flood (Brinton 1868; Roe 1982a)” .

If the Coa Hoop is perceived as the uterus of the Divine Mother then it is logical to suggest that this is the place where Yoka Hu gestates in a fetal form and from where he is later born.

Fernandez-Mendez maintains that a very important role of the Coa Hoop is as a base upon which a three-pointer stone image can be tied. This opinion is shared by Jeffery B. Walker in his treatise Taino Stone Collars, Elbow Stones, and Three-Pointers (Jeffery B. Walker, Contribution number 7 in the compendium “Taino, Pre-Columbian Art and Culture from the Caribbean", edited by Fatima Bercht, Estrellita Brodsky, John Alan Farmer, and Dicey Taylor), where he also cites the same contention as being held by Jesse Walter Fewkes (1970, 167, 170-172), Samuel K. Lothrop (1923), Gordon F. Ekholm (1961, 369-371), and Jose Julian Acosta y Caldo(Abbad y Lasierra 1866) and others.

Walker suggests that the Tainos tied three-pointer stone images to the sides of Coa Hoops and then later ceremonially untied and separated them as part of a dramatic re-enactment of the ancient narrative in which a turtle emerges and separates from the hunped back of Deminan Caracaracol. We contend that, given all of the obvious uterine identification of the Coa Hoop (including its association to Ata Bey by Fernandez Mendez), the separation dramatized by the untying and separating of the Coa Hoop and the three-pointer actually represents the separation that takes place between a womb and a new-born baby rather than the Deminan hunchback story. It is an accepted fact that many of the three pointer cemies have been almost unanimously identified with the male spirit Yoka Hu by most scholars. (Joseph Campbell, HISTORICAL ATLAS OF WORLD MYTHOLOGY, part#3 Mythologies Of Primitive Planters: sub-section -The Middle and Southern Americas "Arrom sees this as an evident refence to the numerous three-pointed stone images that have been known to scholarship...These are almost certainly representations of Yocahuguama...).

It would seem only logical to assume that any tying of this obvious sculptural reference of Yoka Hu to an equally obvious stone oval sculptural reference of his mother's womb and then any subsequent untying of the same must suggest the human gestation sequence that begins with the attachment of the embryo to the blood-rich inner wall of the uterus, CONCEPTION, and ultimately ends with the detachment and separation of the new-born baby from that same womb, BIRTH.

The scholars in charge of the Taino collection housed at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington D.C. seem to hold a similar perception of this concept. They maintain a beautifully sculpted Coa Hoop and an equally beautiful three pointer, and they keep these two tied together. The interesting thing is that rather than tying the three-pointer to the outside surface of the Coa Hoop as suggested by Walker, they keep it tied to the inner surface as if it belonged "inside" the hoop, in other words, inside the protective covering of the maternal womb.

On March 15 We in the Caney Indigenous Spiritual Circle of Pittsburgh will celebrate Equinox by performing a ceremony that reflects in a very sacred and prayerful manner the ancient rituals that we know were performed by our Taino ancestors. We are going to untie and separate the three-pointer cemi image of Yoka Hu from the side of a Coa Hoop that represents his mother's womb where it was tied and attached back in December on the Winter Solstice. By doing this we will continue a tradition that even the archeologists agree was celebrated hundreds of years ago by the ancient Tainos.

Taino Ti
Miguel Sobaoko Koromo Sague