Hupia

Also Known As: Taíno opía, op’a; the soul of a living person was the goeíza, and a dead person or thing was operito
Region/Culture: Mesoamerica and the Caribbean
Mythos: Native Caribbean Mythology, Caribbean Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Undead/Cursed Beings
Mythical Attributes: It can take any shape at all, including the face of someone recently buried, and it dissolves out of any grip that closes on it.
Role in Mythos: It is what a Taíno person becomes at death, confined in Coaybay through the daylight hours and loose among the living every night.
Relation to Humans: The dead came back down into the villages after dark to eat, to dance and to lie with people who did not know what they were holding. The Taíno had exactly one way of telling them apart, and it was done by hand.

The test was a hand on the stomach. In the villages of Hispaniola, when the drumming had gone on long enough that faces stopped being reliable and the guavas were splitting sweet on the ground, a man would reach out and press his palm flat against the belly of the person beside him and feel for the small knot of skin that every living body carries. If his fingers found nothing there, the word for it was operito. Dead.

The friar who wrote that down was Ramón Pané, a Catalan hermit of the Order of Saint Jerome, sent by Columbus to live among the Taíno of northern Hispaniola and find out what they believed. He finished around the end of 1498, which makes his account the first book written in the Americas in a European language, and very nearly the only record of Taíno religion set down while there were still Taíno communities to record it from. He apologises inside it for the disorder. He had written in stages, on whatever came to hand, in a language he had learned imperfectly and through an interpreter who spoke a different one. Then the manuscript was lost, and so was the Spanish copy Ferdinand Columbus made from it. What survives is an Italian translation published in 1571, taken from Ferdinand’s biography of his father, which had quoted Pané at length. The Yale scholar José Juan Arrom rebuilt the text out of that in 1974, working back through the comparative grammar of related Arawak languages to recover the Taíno words the Italian had mangled.

What Pané was told runs like this. The dead go to a place called Coaibai, which lies at one end of the island, in a district named Soraya. Arrom read Coaybay as the house and dwelling place of the dead, and Soraya as somewhere remote, inaccessible and unreal; an older reading takes it simply as the sunset. The first to arrive there, and its lord, was Maquetaurie Guayaba, who carries the guava inside his name. There is no judgement anywhere in this arrangement, no fire, no reward. There is a district on the far side of the island, a lord, and fruit.

By day the dead are shut in. At night they come out to enjoy themselves and to eat a fruit about the size of a peach, and the surviving text says something stranger than that as well: at night they turn into fruit, take their recreation, and go about together with the living. The line is damaged. A word has fallen out where Pané tried to describe the taste, and the sentence about the fruit reads like two sentences shoved together by a translator who had stopped following. Whatever it originally said, the association it left behind has never come loose. Guava is what the dead eat.

Two words came through intact. While a person is alive the soul is called goeíza; once that person is dead it is called opía, which is where the modern spelling hupia comes from. Arrom read goeíza as something close to our face, our countenance, and that reading turns the whole system over. A living soul has a face. It is that face and nobody else’s. What death takes is not existence but singularity. An opía can be a man, a woman, your father, your mother, your brother, a relative you never met. It can be anyone, which is another way of saying it is no one.

Which is why the hand goes to the stomach and not to the face. The navel is the scar of an attachment, the proof of having been carried and delivered by one particular woman, and among a people who reckoned descent through the mother that scar was also a claim: a line, a village, a place to stand. The dead have lost it. Maria Poviones-Bishop sets the two absences side by side, no face and no navel, and what falls out is a spirit with neither an identity nor a position in the world. Nothing to name, and nothing to belong to.

Pané’s chapter records two men who learned this with their arms. One lay with a woman of Coaibai without thinking to check, and went to take hold of her, and there was nothing there; she had simply gone. The other went looking for a fight, squared up to a spirit in the dark and lunged to get his arms around it, and his arms kept travelling, through the space where it had been and up into the branches of a tree, where he was left hanging. Everybody believed this, Pané says, the young and the old alike, and hardly anyone would go about alone after dark. He attaches the second story not to an opía but to a goeíza, the soul of a living person. The two categories leaked into each other in the telling.

Bats account for the rest of it, or at least the carvings do. Bats sleep the daylight away in caves, which the Taíno understood as openings into the world underneath, and they come out at dusk to feed on soft ripe fruit, and the fruit they take first is guava. Stevens-Arroyo set those two habits beside the opía and suggested that the shape the dead wore while daylight held them was a sleeping bat. García Arévalo, working from the objects rather than the texts, found skull imagery fusing with bats and owls across Taíno art, and noticed that some of the small carved bat figures are pierced clean through the middle of the body. He reads that hole as the navel that is not there. Not everyone agrees. Petitjean Roget reads bats as men and dryness, set against frogs as women and wetness, though the archaeology sits better with the first reading, and the owls have never been more than suggestive, since Europeans brought their own death-owl with them and it is hard now to tell whose bird is whose.

What an opía can do follows from what it lost. Having no fixed form, it takes any it likes. Having no face, it cannot be recognised. Having no navel, it cannot be traced back to a mother, a lineage or a name. It cannot be held, because there is nothing in it to hold. And nothing in the record says it wants to harm anybody. It wants fruit, company, dancing, and when it can get it, sex.

Its limits are drawn just as tightly. Daylight shuts it away, every day, without exception. It cannot keep the disguise under a palm laid flat on the belly, which is a strangely domestic weakness for a spirit and says a good deal about how close to ordinary life the Taíno kept their dead. And the dissolving embrace is less a trick played on the living than a plain statement of the condition: reach for the dead and they are not there, and you go over into the branches.

López-Baralt counted the places where Pané breaks his own voice to editorialise, and the two chapters on the dead carry more of it than anything else in the book. A hereafter with no judgement in it, open to people who had never heard of his God, stocked with fruit and dancing, appears to have unsettled him. It was solid enough for the people who held it. When the cacique Hatuey was told before his execution that baptism would send him to heaven, he asked whether Spaniards went there, and declined. Las Casas presents that as a man choosing hell. Hatuey had somewhere else to go.

Almost none of this is what the word means now. Michael Crichton took it for Jurassic Park in 1990 and gave it to Costa Rica, where it had never lived, describing hupia as “night ghosts, faceless vampires who kidnapped small children.” Faceless he got from something real. The rest is his. There are no stolen infants in Pané, no blood and no hunt, only a crowd of the dead coming down into the villages after dark for the guava, and one hand quietly checking a stranger’s stomach.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a hupia in Taíno mythology?

A hupia is the spirit of a dead person in Taíno belief, written opía or op’a in the surviving record. When a Taíno person died the soul went to Coaybay, the land of the dead, and came out from there each night to move among the living. The spirit of a living person was a different thing with a different name, the goeíza.

How can you tell a hupia from a living person?

By feeling for the navel. The Taíno held that the dead have no navel, so the test was to lay a hand flat on the person’s stomach; if there was nothing there, the person was operito, meaning dead. The test mattered because a hupia could wear the face of anyone, including a dead relative, and could not be identified by sight.

Why do hupia eat guava?

Guava is the food of the dead in Taíno belief. Pané records that the dead were shut away by day and came out at night to eat a fruit about the size of a peach, and the lord of Coaybay, Maquetaurie Guayaba, carries the word for guava in his name. The link is usually explained through the bat, which sleeps by day in caves and feeds at night on ripe guava.

Where do the hupia live?

The hupia live in Coaybay, which Pané places at one end of the island in a district called Soraya. It was not a place of punishment or reward. The dead were confined there through the daylight hours and released at night to eat, dance and mix with the living.

Is the hupia a child-stealing monster?

No. That version comes from Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel Jurassic Park, which relocated the hupia to Costa Rica and made them faceless vampires who take small children. The one early account of Taíno belief, written by Ramón Pané around 1498, describes the hupia as the dead returning at night for fruit and company, not as predators.