Welcome to the BoricuameRican podcast! I’m your host, Nancy Pinto, flying solo today. I’m so happy you’re here and excited to bring you our next episode, which deals with a few beliefs held by the original inhabitants of Puerto Rico, the Taino people. But first, housekeeping. We have two Instagram accounts, @boricuamerican_podcast and @boricuamerican, AND a Facebook group, @boricuamerican. You can also email us at nancylynnpinto@gmail.com. We would love it if you could please subscribe to the show, leave us a review and rating, and tell a friend about BoricuameRican! They don’t even have to be either Boricua OR American! And definitely feel free to reach out to us with any questions or comments! We appreciate your support!
Here we go! Today we’re gonna talk about some of the beliefs the Tainos held about creation, death and the afterlife. We’re only gonna scratch the surface here, and I apologize in advance for anything I may have gotten wrong. Historians have had to piece things together because the Tainos did not keep written records. Like many tribes, they passed down their stories and traditions orally. In a lot of cases it was the Spanish colonizers, including Christopher Columbus, who wrote down what they observed. We will link sources to everything in the show notes.
OK so real quick history review. The Taino culture was developed by the Arawak Indians, who arrived and were settled in Puerto Rico – in those days called Boriken - by 1000 CE (or AD if you’re old school). In other words the Tainos are Native Americans of Puerto Rico. They were the only population there until Columbus and his crew arrived in 1493, and then all hell broke loose and they were almost – but not entirely! – totally decimated. We’re very fortunate to have information about their culture. So let’s dive in.
It's important to note that Tainos were polytheistic. They worshipped gods called zemis (or cemis), for which they also made stone representations. Every people had a story to explain the creation of life and the world, and the Tainos were no different.
The first god was a creator god. This was Atabey. She was a goddess who created the heavens and then created her sons, twins Yucáhu and Guacar, so they could take over and finish creating earth and skies and nature.
Yucáhu then took over and became God of creation, the sky, the sea, bountiful harvest and peace (his twin brother, Guacar, was a whiny jealous little baby who ran and “hid within the heavens, never to be seen again.”
Yucáhu was also known by the following three names: Yúkiyu Bagua Maórokoti. The first name, Yukiyu or Yúcahu means spirit or giver of cassava (cassava is a starchy root veggie that was an important staple in the Taino diet. It has a rough brown exterior and firm white interior). Bagua has been interpreted as meaning both "the sea" itself and "master of the sea." The name Maórocoti implies that he was conceived without male intervention (sounds like Jesus!).
So now, beliefs about death, the afterlife, and ghost spirits called Hupias:
Tainos believed the human spirit lived on after death. It passed into another life. As we said before, a lot of what we know came from the Spanish, who were Catholic and wrote with their own religious biases. When we read that Tainos believed in a Christian-sounding heaven where you party and meet up with loved ones that went before, or an agonizing hell as punishment for not worshiping the gods or behaving badly while alive, that’s probably the Christian writer’s interpretation and not really a Taino belief.
The Taínos took the burial process very seriously. “Personal belongings of the deceased were placed in the tomb with the newly dead, and bodies were carefully arranged in a squatting position.” In fact, there’s an archeological site you can visit in the south of Puerto Rico, near Ponce, where you can see the oldest known Indian burial ground in the Antilles. It’s the Tibes Indian Ceremonial Center, and among the important displays are skeletons that date from about 300 AD. You can see an actual skeleton that was left how it was found – in fetal position.
Not much was written about Taino burial practices in Puerto Rico. Most accounts concentrate on the burials of the elite - mostly caciques, perhaps nitainos (who were also of the noble class), and little if anything was written about the funerary practices of the general population (naboria). Furthermore, most of what was recorded pertains to Hispaniola, not Puerto Rico. So all they can do is assume that practices on the other islands was the same or similar. So take the below with a grain of salt. Either way it’s very interesting. For example, check out some of the burial practices for the chiefs (caciques):
Chiefs were buried with one of their living wives, typically the favorite one (Tainos were polygamous and most often it was the men who had multiple wives). Now, this was recorded as a practice on the island of Hispaniola so it’s not 100 percent certain it happened in other chiefdoms but the possibility is there.
Some other documented funeral practices among different native societies, for chiefs:
1. opening the body and drying it over a fire
2. placing the head of a deceased chief in a basket or gourd
3. burying him (or her – women could be leaders!) in a cave with cassava bread and water
4. cremating the body in the house where he or she died.
5. The body of the deceased chief was wrapped with cotton bandages from head to feet and was seated on a ceremonial stool, called a duho, inside a wooden tomb.
Commoners were thought to have been buried outside their houses – in the forest, to be exact – because they were afraid of spirits.
Another tradition that may or may not have happened specifically in Puerto Rico was the “placement of selected bones of the deceased relatives in an higuero (gourd, calabash) vessel or a basket, that then was hung inside the house. This practice implies that selected bones skulls are specifically mentioned from primary interments were later gathered and brought into a household context, thus becoming the object of ancestor worship.”
Another noteworthy finding by archaeologists that studied burial practices is that the early Tainos had communal burial grounds, where everyone, regardless of rank, was treated the same after death. Then as they move further in time, they realized that people started being buried near their households. So it separated who was who. It tied burial to social and political class.
As for Taino beliefs about the afterlife. Tainos believed that when someone died, their spirit was released from the body. This spirit is called op’a or hupia. Hupias could appear as a faceless person, or take any form they want, including the form of a deceased loved one. The ones that take on a human form do not have a navel. Hupias slept during the day, and came out at night. They had a reputation for seducing women and kidnapping people who went out after dark. Yeesh!
The op’a or hupia went to live in a “remote early paradise” called Coaybay (or Coyaba or Coabey), the underworld land of the dead. Coaybay was watched over and ruled by a god called Maketaori (also spelled Maquetaurie), last name Guayaba. Maketaori kept the balance between the forces of the daytime (which stood for orderliness and the world of the living) and the forces of the night (chaos and the world of the dead). Also, Maketaori is associated with bats. That’s very Halloween! But what’s up with Guayaba? Guayaba is the Spanish word for the guava fruit. Well, it was believed that at night, Hupias would take the form of a bat and eat guava. To this day some country people in parts of the Caribbean are still afraid of caves because of this association.
There was also a bodyguard, a god named Opiyelguabirán. This being was half human, half dog (human head, but dog body from the waist down). Opiyelguabirán kept the living and the dead where they belonged.
Tainos believed in a spirit world that their chiefs and shamans could directly access. They had a whole ritual which started with cleansing and purging, and when they were ready, they put this hallucinogenic substance called cohoba on top of a zemi (zemi was not just a god, it was also the word for the physical representation of the god). The chief or shaman would then sniff the cohoba, which was sometimes mixed with crushed seashells or tobacco to enhance the trip!
Once the chief or shaman was high, they entered the supernatural realm, and communicated with the gods/spirits or ancestors about a bunch of issues, including warfare, harvesting, cures for the sick, and other important matters.
SOURCES:
https://www.britannica.com/place/Puerto-Rico/History
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%C3%BAcahu
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Myth/TainoMythology#:~:text=Maquetaurie%20Guayaba%20was%20the%20lord,He%20is%20associated%20with%20bats.
http://www.jnht.com
https://www.donquijote.org/dominican-culture/traditions/taino-people/#:~:text=As%20for%20the%20ideology%20of,an%20eternity%20in%20a%20paradisiacal
https://www.frommers.com/destinations/utuado/attractions/overview#:~:text=The%20Ta%C3%ADnos%20believed%20in%20life,arranged%20in%20a%20squatting%20position.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ta%C3%ADno
https://www.americanindianmagazine.org/story/abuelas-ancestors-and-atabey-spirit-taino-resurgence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hupia
https://tainomuseum.org/taino/religion/
https://orias.berkeley.edu/resources-teachers/societies-americas/ta%C3%ADnos-caribbean-indigenous-peoples
https://www.puertoricodaytrips.com/tibes/
https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-americas/early-cultures/xf20f462f:taino/a/taino-zemis-and-duhos
https://www.openwidetheworld.com/blog/puerto-rico-the-taino-and-tibes
Paper: MORTUARY PRACTICES, SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT, AND IDEOLOGY IN PRECOLUMBIAN PUERTO RICO by L. Antonio Curet and Jose R. Oliver