Taino Myth and South American Origins

Ricardo Alegria's Apuntes en torno a la mitología de los indios taínos de las antillas mayores y sus orígenes suramericanos is yet another study of Taino mythology using a comparative approach with South American lowland peoples. Given the fragmented nature of our understanding of Taino mythology, relying mainly on Ramón Pané  and the usual Spanish sources, one can see the advantages of an approach incorporating data from extant South American indigenous peoples. The analogies, parallels, and even repetition of the same motifs in Taino and South American mythology certainly supports it, too. In order to demonstrate this, Alegria focuses on myths about the origins of humanity, the beginning of women, divine twins, and tales of the flood or deluge. Using Pané as the basis, as well as Pedro Martir, Ulloa, and the work of Levi-Strauss and others who collected and analyzed South American myths, Alegria illustrates the mainly South American tropical origin of the Taino.

As one might expect from the linguistic, archaeological, and ethnographic evidence indicating South American origins (at least for Saladoid expansion, which seems to have included cohoba ritual paraphernalia and a specific ceramics tradition to the Antilles), Taino myth shares much of its references to cultural heroes, social norms, and ritual-religious processes with indigenous peoples across the tropical lowlands. Venezuela, Guyana, and even Brazilian indigenous peoples like the Tupi can be seen to share some of the same mythological lore. For instance, tales of the origin of women across the region refer to figures carved of stone who gain female genitalia through a wood-pecker bird. This, of course, also appears in the myths collected by Pané in Hispaniola. Moreover, several South American indigenous groups posit very similar origins of humanity. Indeed, several peoples believed humans lived in a subterranean world and only entered the surface through caves (for a notable exception, Caribs appear to have believed humans descended from the sky). They were often led out of the caves through a cord that breaks, leaving some in the other world. Those familiar with Pané can also find a similar example from Hispaniola, where humans were believed to have arose from caves. 

In addition, belief in divine twins who become culture heroes for establishing traditions and sharing their knowledge with posterity are also incredibly common. In nearly all the myths mentioned here, the divine twins are born of a woman whose husband abandons or leaves her. The father of her sons is often the Sun. After beginning a journey to take her unborn sons to meet their father, the mother is killed or faces misfortune due to a jaguar or ogro or other being. The killer of the mother then raises the twins who, after learning or mastering the skills of fire, casabe or proper behavior, seek vengeance for their mother. While several South American peoples believed these divine twins later became the Sun and the Moon, and/or one twin was brilliant and the other was a fool, the Taino myth from Hispaniola instead features 4 twin sibling (representing the four winds or cardinal directions?). Born to the same mother and an unnamed father (the Sun?), the only divine twin named is Deminan. Deminan and his brothers fulfil a similar role to Taino society as the divine twins in South American myths. Indeed, they play a pivotal role in the origins of the sea through knocking over the calabash containing Yayael. They also, through the female turtle that emerges from Deminan's back, may have become ancestors to a new generation of humans through their children with the turtle. As mentioned previously, allusions to an ancient flood that once covered the land or explains the origin of the sea also appears in Taino and South American myth.

While some of the similarities between Taino and tropical South American myth can be construed as a result of archetypes, the numerous parallels and variations of the same few details point to a distant shared past. The Taino, as explained by Alegria, would have had to modify South American traditions due to the different environment and fauna of the Greater Antilles. They were also several centuries removed from their ancient South American origins when their traditions were recorded in the 1490s. Despite the distances in time and geography, it is astonishing to see how deeply immersed South American lowland cultural traditions must have been in time. The ritual and social complex of shamanism, cohoba (or similar drug paraphernalia), and yuca culture diffused across northeastern South America along the rivers in the era preceding Saladoid expansion into the Caribbean. While some of the similarities between the Taino and their South American cousins may also be a result of later trade and migration that connected the Greater Antilles to the continent via the Lesser Antilles, the similarities across a vast region of South America suggest a far deeper antiquity. If approached cautiously, this reservoir of data can fill in some of the huge gaps in our understanding of Taino history and cultural development.