Zemí

Hunters on Hispaniola ran an animal to ground in a ravine, and when they looked down after it they saw a log lying in the bottom that appeared to be alive. The man who noticed it went to his cacique, and the cacique came and looked, and agreed. They built a house next to the log. That should have been the end of it, but the thing kept leaving. It would turn up somewhere near the ravine it had come from, never quite in the same spot, and they would carry it back. Eventually the chief’s son had it found, tied, and put in a sack. Ramón Pané, the Catalan friar Columbus left behind to write down what the Taíno believed, records that it went on walking anyway. He gives its name as Faraguvaol and moves on to the next chapter, which is very much his manner.

Zemí is not the word for a statue of a god. It is the word for the force itself, a vital power belonging to deities and to the dead, and for the object that force takes up residence in, and the Taíno saw no reason to separate the two. Yúcahu, who made the cassava grow, was a zemí. So was Atabey, mother of waters. So was the skull of a grandfather set in a woven basket in the corner of a house, and so was a stone the size of a fist buried at the edge of a field. The category stretched from the highest gods to a family’s particular dead, and every one of them could be spoken to, if you knew how.

Making one was not a matter of choosing a subject and carving it. According to Pané, the spirit made the first approach. Someone walking in the forest would see a tree move at the roots, which was the tree announcing itself, and would fetch a behique, the ritual specialist who dealt with such things. The behique sat down beside the trunk, took cohoba, the dark snuff ground from the seeds of Anadenanthera peregrina, and once it had taken hold he addressed the tree with the proper honours and asked it three things: who it was, what it was doing there, and what it wanted. Sometimes the answer was that it wished to be cut and carried away. The behique promised it a house and a planted field, and only then did the axe come out. The wood was cut into the shape the spirit had shown him.

The results are the most recognisable objects the Taíno left. The three-pointed stone, the trigonolito, is peculiar to them: a squat triangle of hard volcanic rock or shell, often with a snarling face rising at one point and a pair of drawn-up legs at the other, dense and cold and heavier in the hand than its size suggests. Very small ceramic versions turn up across the Lesser Antilles and as far south as Colombia and Venezuela, some of them more than two thousand years old, which makes the form far older than the Taíno chiefdoms that perfected it. The smallest were worn on the forehead going into battle. The larger ones went into the conuco, the mounded planting field, where their business was cassava.

Others were built for the ceremony itself. A wooden figure from the Dominican Republic, now in New York and carved around a thousand years ago, shows a man in the last stage of a fast, ribs standing out under the skin in low relief, a woven cap on his head, tight ligatures binding his upper arms and ankles, his mouth open and his shell teeth bared in the fixed grimace of someone deep in the snuff. On top of his skull is a shallow dish. That dish is the point of him. The face weeps, which is how he is identified as Boinayel, who gives rain.

The cacique would empty his stomach first with a carved stick, because the powder was not to meet food. Then the cohoba went into the bowl on the zemí’s head, sometimes cut with tobacco or powdered shell to sharpen it, and he leaned in over a forked tube of bird bone and drew it up through both nostrils, seated low on a duho, the four-legged guayacán stool that only chiefs and behiques used, its back curved to hold a man who was about to stop being much use to himself. What came next was understood as conversation. He asked about the coming season, about an enemy, about the cause of a sickness, and the zemí answered.

They were unmistakably individuals, and Pané was told about them by name. There was Vaibrama, burned during a war and afterwards washed with cassava juice, so that his arms grew back, his eyes came in new, and his body filled out again, and who sent illness to the household that forgot to bring him food. There was Corocote, who lived on the roof of a chief’s house and came down at night to lie with the women, and whose children were known by the two crowns on their heads. There was Opiyelguobirán, four-footed like a dog and cut from wood, who slipped out of the house night after night to hide in the forest, and was fetched back and bound with cord, and got out again; when the Christians landed he ran for a lagoon, and after that nobody saw him. And there was Guabancex, a woman made of the stone of her own country, who kept two others with her: Guatauba, the crier who ordered the other zemís of the province to join in, and Coatrisquie, who gathered water in the mountain valleys and then let it go all at once down the length of the island.

So the powers were plain enough. Weather, harvest, fertility, prophecy, diagnosis, cure. A zemí with a relative’s bones inside it looked after that relative’s descendants ahead of anyone else’s. And because the spirits underwrote the authority of the man who housed them, a chief’s collection was also his political standing, which is why the Spanish took them so seriously as rivals and why the archaeologist José Oliver could reconstruct whole networks of alliance from the way particular cemís travelled between Hispaniola and Puerto Rico.

The limits were just as plain. They had to be fed. A hungry zemí turned on its keepers and put them in their hammocks with fevers. They could be burned, stolen, inherited, given away as a gift with strings attached, and they were entirely capable of leaving, which is a strange quality in a stone. Against the extirpation that followed 1492 they had no answer at all. Wooden figures were carried into dry caves and left there, some of them surviving five centuries in the dark on that account, and others were destroyed by their own owners rather than handed over. One of the most elaborate to escape, a beaded figure of shell, glass and mirror with a cacique on one face and a skull-like mask on the other, sat in a museum in Rome catalogued as an African fetish until 1952, when somebody finally read it correctly.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a zemí?

A zemí is both a Taíno spirit and the carved object that houses it. The word covers gods such as Yúcahu and Atabey, lesser spirits of rain and wind, and the honoured dead, along with the stone, wood, shell or bone figure each of them inhabits. Taíno belief drew no line between the spirit and its sculpture.

What were zemís made of?

Zemís were carved from stone, wood, shell, bone, clay and cotton, and some had the bones or skull of an ancestor built into them. Wooden examples were cut from tropical hardwoods, and the finest have eyes and teeth inlaid with white shell. Sizes run from amulets small enough to tie to a warrior’s forehead to figures around a metre tall.

What was a zemí used for?

Zemís were consulted for advice, healing and prophecy, and were asked to bring rain, wind and a good cassava harvest. A cacique or behique would purge himself, place cohoba snuff in the bowl carved on the zemí’s head, inhale it through a forked tube, and treat what followed as a conversation with the spirit. Three-pointed stone zemís were also set in planting fields to help the cassava.

Why did zemís have to be fed?

A zemí expected offerings of food in return for its help, and punished a household that neglected it with sickness. Pané records the zemí Vaibrama sending illness to the people who kept his house because they had failed to bring him cassava. The relationship was reciprocal rather than devotional: shelter and food in exchange for weather, crops and counsel.

What happened to the zemís after the Spanish arrived?

Spanish colonists treated zemís as idols and as a direct threat to their authority, since the objects underpinned the power of Taíno chiefs. Many were hidden in dry caves, where the wooden ones survived for centuries, and others were destroyed by their owners rather than surrendered. Pané reports that the dog-shaped zemí Opiyelguobirán fled to a lagoon when the Christians came and was never seen again.

Related Entries

Yúcahu, Atabey, Hupia, Ciguapa, Chickcharney, Tupilaq, Kachina, Manitou, Tsukumogami, Golem, Lares, Di Penates