Boinayel and Márohu

Rain in the Greater Antilles does not creep in. It arrives as a wall, and dry ground turns to running water in under a minute. When the sky refused to do that over Hispaniola, people walked into a cave in the country of a chief and went to stand in front of two small stone men.

The cave was called Iguanaboína. Fray Ramón Pané, the Hieronymite friar Columbus left behind in 1494 with orders to find out what the Taíno actually believed, wrote down what was inside it, and those few sentences are the reason anyone knows these two exist at all. The walls were painted all over, he says, in the local manner, with no figure of any kind, only foliage and things of that sort. Abstract work, in other words, described by a man with no vocabulary for it. The sun and the moon had come out of this cave. And standing in it were two cemís made of stone, small, about the length of half an arm, with their hands tied, and they seemed to be sweating.

Damp limestone will bead in the heat, and the people who kept these figures knew exactly what they were looking at. Water coming out of stone, in the dark, at the place where the sky was made. When the rain stopped coming, they went in to visit, and Pané reports that it started again immediately. One of the two they called Boinayel. The other they called Márohu.

The names are a matched pair, and they mean opposite things. José Juan Arrom, the Cuban philologist who spent decades untangling the mangled text of the Relación, read Boinayel as son of the grey serpent, from a word related to the Amazonian boiúna, a dark snake, with an ending carrying the sense of offspring. Since the grey serpent is the cloud heavy with water, the name resolves to something closer to son of the rain-swollen sky. Márohu he read as without rain, clear weather. Two brothers, one cave, and between them everything the sky is capable of.

Their mother is the cave itself. Iguanaboína pairs the iguana with that same serpent word, and she is the great mottled grey snake who gathers the water of the tropical air, winds it into cloud until it darkens, and squeezes it out over the island below. Her sons are her two moods. There is no birth story, no quarrel between them, no cycle of adventures to recount, and the absence is not an accident of survival. The arrangement was the point. Rain and no rain were not enemies to be ranked but a single working thing kept in one room.

Boinayel, at least, got a face. In 1915, near Punta de Maisí at the far eastern end of Cuba, the archaeologist Mark Harrington was working a large ceremonial cave the local people called the Cueva del Agua when a snake revealed itself, coiled on top of a stalagmite. A colleague caught it. Minutes later Harrington looked properly at the stalagmite he had walked past many times and found a face carved into it, and beneath the face the suggestion of a body: round eyes, a thin nose and mouth, arms fading down each side to meet at the front, male genitals between the legs. Four feet of limestone, twenty-five inches across. It faced east. On certain June and July mornings a shaft of light came through a crevice and lay across the face for a few minutes before sliding off.

Two grooves run down from the outer corners of both eyes and fade into the cheeks. That is the identification. The figure belongs to a family of Taíno images the Spanish-language scholarship calls llora-lluvias, rain-criers, whose tears fall as weather, and Dominican specialists have found the same weeping face at the Chacuey plaza, in the Cueva de la Sábila, and among the pictographs of the Cueva del Ferrocarril. Cuban speleologists who measured the Patana cave concluded that the whole chamber was an instrument for catching the turn of the wet season, with the carved figure standing at the centre of it.

Harrington did not leave him there. He wired George Gustav Heye in New York that evening, and Heye wired back two words: get the idol. A two-man saw was borrowed and had to be oiled and sharpened repeatedly through the work. The carved face came off the stalagmite, the base was cut into five pieces, and the whole thing went down to the coast strapped to a mule and out through the port of Baracoa. The Idol of Patana now lies in a drawer in a climate-controlled building in Suitland, Maryland. Cuba has been asking for him back for a very long time.

What the brothers can do is narrow and absolute. Boinayel opens the sky and Márohu closes it, and there is nothing in the record about health, war, childbirth or safe passage, which is unusual for figures with this much surviving iconography. They were called on at the start of the wet season, around May, when the yuca in the conucos needed water and the gap between a good year and a hungry one was a few weeks of timing. Recognition of that moment was worth building a cave around.

The limits are just as narrow. Neither brother acts on his own initiative anywhere in the record; they are always the ones visited, looked at, wept over, waited on. They are also, in the oldest description we have, tied. Whatever the bound hands meant to the people who carved them, they do not read as omnipotence. And the power was fixed to one chamber in one chiefdom, which is very likely why the cave was reproduced elsewhere, including on Cuba, so that other communities could open their own door onto the same sky. Márohu gets one word in the entire surviving record, and it is his name.

He has done better lately. In 2019 the International Astronomical Union invited every country to name a star and its planet, and Dominican schoolchildren chose this pair. The star WASP-6, in Aquarius, is now Márohu, and the inflated hot gas giant whipping round it every three days is Boinayel. Six hundred and fifty light years from the cave, the two of them are still going round together.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who are Boinayel and Márohu in Taíno mythology?

Boinayel and Márohu are twin weather cemís of the Taíno of the Greater Antilles. Boinayel brings rain and Márohu brings clear, cloudless skies, and they are the sons of Iguanaboína, the grey serpent of the cave from which the sun and moon emerged. Both are known from a single passage in Fray Ramón Pané’s account of Taíno belief, written between about 1495 and 1498.

What do the names Boinayel and Márohu mean?

Boinayel means son of the grey serpent and Márohu means without rain, according to the reconstruction by the Cuban philologist José Juan Arrom. The grey serpent stands for the rain-laden cloud, so Boinayel’s name effectively identifies him as the child of the storm sky. The oldest surviving text spells the names Boinayol and Maroya, and the familiar modern forms are Arrom’s restoration of a badly transmitted manuscript.

What did the Taíno do to make it rain?

They went into the cave called Iguanaboína and visited two small stone cemís kept there, and Pané records that the rain then came at once. The figures were about half an arm long, had their hands bound, and appeared to be sweating. The cave walls were painted all over with abstract foliage designs rather than human or animal figures.

Why is Boinayel shown with lines running down his face?

The grooves are tears, and the tears are the rain. Images of this kind belong to a Taíno type known in the scholarship as llora-lluvias, or rain-criers, and the motif appears on the carved stalagmite known as the Idol of Patana in eastern Cuba as well as at Dominican sites including the Chacuey plaza and the Cueva de la Sábila.

Is there a star named after Boinayel and Márohu?

Yes. In 2019 the International Astronomical Union approved names chosen by schoolchildren in the Dominican Republic for the star WASP-6 in the constellation Aquarius and its planet WASP-6b. The star is now called Márohu and the planet is called Boinayel.

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