Latin-American Mythology. Hartley Burr Alexander
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Название: Latin-American Mythology
Автор: Hartley Burr Alexander
Издательство: Bookwire
Жанр: Зарубежная психология
isbn: 4064066309640
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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.
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 LORE21
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 СКАЧАТЬ