Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [79]
The Spanish visitors had never seen anything like these strenuous games. Nor had they seen an elastic ball, rubber, or rubber plants. From these innocent, spontaneous encounters between cultures, the first traces of an American character began to form, although it went unacknowledged at a time when slaves and spices and gold led the agenda, along with not-soinnocent sexual encounters.
Nor had Columbus’s men seen anything like the Indians’ fantastic religious rites. The same courtyard where ball games were played served as the setting for elaborate Taíno ceremonies to honor local deities; elaborate observances of marriage and death, and battles; and reenactments of the deeds of their forefathers, all with hypnotic musical accompaniment. On the day of an observance, the pulse-quickening rhythms of Taíno drums and flutes reverberated throughout the public courtyard and the forest beyond. The most conspicuous instrument that Columbus and his men probably heard was the mayohuacán, or maguey, a drum carved from a substantial tree trunk, with an oval slit—or a slit in the shape of an H—on the top. The design produced a deep, powerful resonance that could be heard for miles around as a drummer used one or two sticks to strike the mayohuacán, which was suspended between trees. The Taínos made music, too, with a prototype of maracas, a pair of substantial rattles containing a large ball; slits on the side permitted the rhythmic sound to emerge. Often used in religious ceremonies, they were adorned with carved representations and images of cemís, tiny but mighty Taíno religious figures. They were joined by güiras, raspers fashioned from hollowed-out gourds with ridges notched into their sides. Today, güira and maracas remain integral to Latin American music, as do modern versions of flutes and Taíno whistles called guamós or cobos. And there were the breathy exhalations of a Taíno trumpet, fashioned from a conch shell. Its notes carried throughout the forest to broadcast warnings of danger to distant members of their tribe.
With these instruments, the Taínos performed hymns and rites called areítos to celebrate natural events such as solstices, plantings, and harvests. Areítos commemorated the marriage of a cacique, the birth of an important nitaíno (a Taíno of the ruling caste), or a military victory. “Since time immemorial, particularly in the mansions of their kings, they have ordered their behiques or wise men to instruct their sons in knowledge about everything,” Peter Martyr wrote. “With this teaching, they accomplish two goals: one general, playing [songs] about their origins and development, and the other particular, lauding the illustrious deeds in peace and in war of their fathers, grandfathers, great grandfathers, and other ancestors.” In each case their “melody is perfectly in accord with each theme.”
The Taínos prepared carefully for their sacred areítos. The dancers fasted for eight days before the ceremony, imbibing only an herbal tea, or diga. Before performing, they bathed in rivers and in sacred charcos, natural pools, to purify their bodies. Europeans came to believe that the ritual bathing was meant to propitiate Atabeyra, at times the deity of fresh water and at other times the mother of Yúcahu, the Taínos’ principal god. After they purified themselves, the males decorated their bodies with vegetable-dye images of their cemís. Concluding the purification rite, they plunged elaborately decorated vomiting sticks made from the ribs of a manatee down their throats to empty their stomachs in preparation for receiving divine enlightenment.
At the start of the ceremony, the presiding cacique took his place on a dujo, a stool with four legs, decorated with colorful images of cemís. He inhaled the powerful hallucinogenic cohoba powder through the slender black stems of his pipe, one for each nostril. Cohoba was derived from a slender tree known to botanists as Anadenathera peregrina, and to the Indians as yopo, which flourished throughout the Southern Hemisphere. Its ground seeds produced the