#ethnohistory

[areytonaboria]

Taíno Cosmology: How the Realm (World) is Generally Understood, Not Just What Was Believed

When we talk about Taíno cosmology, it is important to be precise about what that actually means.

This is not a fully preserved system we can reconstruct in complete detail. Instead, this article is discussing the core of it, a partial understanding built from archaeology, early colonial accounts, modern scholarly interpretation and individual family oral histories.

Cosmology, in this sense, refers to how a society understands:

the structure of the world

the relationship between humans and non-human forces

and the ways meaning is organized through land, objects, and experience

For Taíno societies, these ideas are not preserved as a single written system. They are inferred through material culture, recorded descriptions, and patterns that appear across the different sources listed.

For the purpose of this article, I am referring to it as a worldview instead of a belief system. It can be limiting to frame Taíno cosmology only as a “religion” or fixed set of beliefs, so I am not going to. Many Indigenous Caribbean systems are better understood as relational worldviews, where:

spiritual and physical worlds are not fully separated

objects, land, and beings can carry relational meaning

and knowledge is expressed through practice, place, and material engagement

Once again - this does not mean we can fully reconstruct those systems. It means we have to be careful not to force them into categories that may not fit and to keep in mind that every community may not fully commit or agree on all aspects.

One of the most consistent themes across interpretations and practices is that Taíno cosmology is often described in relational terms rather than abstract doctrine. Meaning theres priority to the relationship over abstraction.

Instead of a strict “system of beliefs,” what appears is:

connection between people and ancestral forces

interaction between material objects and meaning

and a landscape that holds significance beyond utility

Because cosmology is often popularized in simplified ways, it is important not to:

flatten Taíno worldview into a single unified doctrine

assume all symbolic meanings are fully known or decoded

or project modern spiritual categories onto fragmented historical evidence

What survives is partial, and different sources may not always align.

I’m explicitly stating all this before getting into it because the more you learn, the more you engage with different sectors of the Taíno community online- you are going to see disagreements on this and MANY authority-esque peoples stating things that are true for their yukayekes but not for others.

You also have to bear in mind the heavy influence of Christianity in the Caribbean. As a result, there are many communities trying to adopt the Taíno Cosmology through a Christian lens, or trying to practice it as a Christian, which often results in them referring to Cemí’nos as “helpers” or other demeaning and minimizing references instead of it being a scared object one should respect because its an extension of a deity or one’s own ancestral spirit. Many contemporary practitioners understand cemís as more than symbolic objects and may describe them as embodiments, manifestations, imbuements, or extensions of spiritual and ancestral relationships. Many struggle to respect Taíno cosmology/spirituality with the same respect they provide to modern religions. Its best to always listen and consider all of these factors when discussing the cosmology and spirituality.

Taíno Cosmology Basics

The most basic place to start is that the world isn’t singular. One of the most widely taught contemporary Taíno cosmological models organizes existence into multiple realms. In the Caney tradition (should note, they didn’t “invent” this model. It is widely believed and has been widely passed down in oral tradition. They are simply the best online resource and most open about discussing it,) these are often described as :

Turey (the Sky Realm)

Ku (the Earth or Middle Realm)

Koa Bay (the ancestral or spirit realm, as referred to as “Coa”)

Different yukayekes and spiritual lineages may describe these realms differently or recognize additional realms, but the three-realm framework is one of the most commonly encountered introductions to Taíno cosmology within contemporary practice.

Image is from the Caney Circle community, depicting the medicine wheel within the realm cosmology (https://www.caneycircle.org/legends/). This particular community is VERY open with their beliefs and you can interact with the Chief Behike online. He’s VERY active and open to discussion and including reconnecting peoples.

This is the most basic accepted cosmology. We acknowledge that there are refences and oral histories that include MORE realms than these, that are more complex. That’s valid. As seen above there's more to the cosmology, but we're just discussing the general core of it. Should you join a yukayeke, you can talk with your Behike directly and discuss. I am not a Behike, and thus will not have this conversation beyond the basic accepted shared cosmology.

Taíno discourse

A specific explanation I have heard for the variance in realm discussions is that some yukayekes connect to different energies and thus have access to specific realms others don’t or cannot. This is also the how and why many in the Caribbean practicing Yoruba spiritualities cross into Taíno cosmology and practice both. This is just a general conversation I’ve seen passed around, but I feel it helps others to understand why I keep saying calling it just a belief system isn’t fully encompassing the realities of what Taíno spirituality is, can be, and is accepted as.

Back to cosmology discussion

The most basic cosmology worldview is widely accepted because it is a) paired down to the very core, and b) it can mirror Christian ideology enough making it very easy to pass down in oral histories and making it most likely to be accurate in regards to preservation.

Contemporary Taíno communities are not limited to archaeology and colonial texts. Many communities maintain oral teachings, ceremonial practices, and cosmological interpretations that function as living traditions in the present. These should not automatically be treated as interchangeable with sixteenth-century historical evidence, but neither should they be dismissed simply because they are contemporary Indigenous knowledge.

If you wish to learn more- seek open Taíno spiritual communities, yukayekes, and ceremonial communities.

Citations Below

Selected References (for further reading, sources for the information discussed in this post)

Ramón Pané — An Account of the Antiquities of the Indians

José R. Oliver — Caciques and Cemí Idols

Antonio Stevens-Arroyo — Cave of the Jagua

Mercedes López-Baralt — El mito taíno: Léxico de cosmología antillana

Irving Rouse — The Taínos: Rise and Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus

William F. Keegan — various works on Taíno archaeology and social organization

The Oxford Handbook of Caribbean Archaeology for archaeological context.

NOT Taíno Specific References (But applicable for your own knowledge and understanding of indigenous spiritualities as worldviews rather than as belief systems)

Gregory Cajete — Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence

Shawn Wilson — Research Is Ceremony

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Crossposting from Twxttxr: some interesting news about ongoing research by colleagues, from a workshop "Diversification of Uralic" just this Thursday and Friday

Do the Permic languages have loanwords from Old Norse? e.g. ONo. ár ~ Komi & Udmurt ar 'year'. This would've been sensible during the brief time when Norsemen originally from Sweden were in charge of trade along the Volga and settling in inner Russia, forming the Rus' (later Slavicized, but as we know from Byzantine sources they remained Norse for centuries) — and also the Norwegians too were known to conduct exploration + trade along the Barents Sea at the time, our oldest written reports of "Bjarmia" come from them after all.

Do the Finnic languages have loanwords already from Pre-Proto-Germanic into Pre-Proto-Finnic? My first reply would've been "yes surely", this has been discussed for half a century and there's dozens of etymologies out by now. Turns out though that there's still a lot of room for skepticism if we try to assemble a big picture. Most of these could be (and have been proposed by other analyses) to be proper Germanic after all, or from some non-Germanic kind of Indo-European, or even incorrect. There is unambiguous evidence I think at least of loans lacking *ā > *ō, but that's already though to be one of the latest common Germanic innovations, perhaps barely post-PG. [Follow-up question: do we even know where Pre-Proto-Germanic was spoken? might not have been anywhere convenient for contacts with Pre-Proto-Finnic.] — A few similar problems also in the less discussed supposed layer of Proto-Balto-Slavic or pre-BSl. loans, but by areal considerations it seems obvious to me there must've been Uralic/IE contact somewhere in the Russian forest belt for ages already, even if it might not have left enough evidence to clearly distinguish from things like pre-Indo-Iranian loans.

Do the Samic languages have loanwords that are not from any historically attested branch of Scandinavian, but some sort of a lost variety entirely? This could be an explanation for an unexpected sound correspondence *j → *ć in many loans; it might also explain some loans that look surprizingly archaic, e.g. lacking any reflection of Siever's Law. One example showing both is indeed *Tāńćə 'Norse', from some sort of a *Danji- variant of Proto-Germanic *Daniz.

Several new hypotheses on the history of of sibilants in Ugric, adding to the growing tally of evidence that traditionally reconstructed *s > *θ and *ś > *s "in Proto-Ugric" are actually later developments. A paper supposed to be coming out soon!

No linguistic evidence so far, but a 1670 travelogue by de La Martinière appears to still report seemingly pre-Uralic populations along the Barents Sea coast — and even on Novaya Zemlya, traditionally thought to have been uninhabited (as reported by other early modern explorers) before some Tundra Nenets briefly settled there in mid 19th century. Apparently there's been no real archeological investigation, but also at least two stone labyrinths are known as signs that humans still must've at least visited there sometime in the past. [By current knowledge, labyrinths from Sweden and Finland have mostly been built in late medieval and early modern times though, so they don't suggest especial antiquity either. Could the ones on NZ in fact have been left behind by some of these historical Northwest European expeditions?]

Various discussion also on the development of Samoyedic. Nothing particularly all-new (maybe on Nganasan, more on that in a PhD thesis to appear later this year though), but a few main results include 1. clear recognition that there is no "North Samoyedic" group (as has been suspected for several years now), 2. confirmation that there is regardless a narrower Nenets–Enets group, and 3. some development of a model where all three of Nenets, Enets and Nganasan may have moved to the tundra zone independently from further down south (as is certainly the case for Northern Selkup, the most recent northern expansion of Samoyedic speakers).

[twodonkeys]

Navigational Chart (Rebbilib) Marshallese people 19th-early 20th century Coconut midrib, fiber

Navigational chart used to assist in recalling and imparting aspects of navigational knowledge of the archipelago. These objects were memory aids, not meant to join the individuals on the sea. To carry one at sea would put a navigator’s skill in question. The charts were made by individuals for personal use and their exact significance was only known to the maker.

[africanrenaissance]

James Baldwin

[possessivesuffix]

Following the Gumuz tangent by looking now a bit more into Koman. Conveniently, for this there is a recent dissertation “A Historical Reconstruction of the Koman Language Family” (Otero 2019) already sketching out all the main lines of development.

The family looks phonologically quite compact really, but low on cognate vocabulary: 25% Swadesh list counts between the two main branches and 20% with poorly attested outlier Gule. Probably though this is not really due to the family having an age of 4000+ years as given by glottochronology estimates, when the sound correspondences are mostly transparent. My spitball take would be closer to 2000 years old and heavy relexification due to low sociolinguistic status. Per Otero, the Koman speakers have apparently for long suffered of slave raiding and land theft by their bigger neighbors. For that matter, maybe loanwords from adjacent languages could explain why the family has been for long thought to be a part of Nilo-Saharan? That other 75% of basic vocabulary has to come from somewhere.

Shoutout in particular to Gwama for showing multiple interesting sound changes:

word-initial *ɓ *ɗ > /pʼ tʼ/

tone-conditioned devoicing: word-initial *b *d *g > /p t k/ before low tone (however *ɟ > /z/ always, without devoicing to /s/)

in-progress word-medial chainshift with /b d g/ > [β ɾ ɣ] and /pʼ tʼ kʼ/ > [b d g]

*s and *ʃ merge before high vowels according to ±ATR: as /s/ before /i u/, as /ʃ/ before /ɪ ʊ/

The tone shift (also found in some other Koman languages) is actually a sort of cheshirization, as low tone is itself conditioned by *voiced initials. Not immediately though, since the tone split is attested also in languages still retaining voiced stops (and also the devoicing also in some languages that appear to have re-merged the low and mid tones).

[possessivesuffix]

The Ostyaks Did Melt

In discussions about the Khanty, there is a pessimistic yet poetic 1900 quote from field researcher K. F. Karjalainen that is repeated fairly often:

“The Ostyak people are melting like snow in the spring sunshine. On the slopes and in the clearings [of the taiga] there are even now some bare patches here and there, but the sun has begun to shine more and more, and so the pace of melting is quickening. Soon nothing more will be seen of the mantle of snow, but the nourishing soil beneath the new grass. In dark holes and under some crooked trees in the forest the observant eye may stumble upon chunks of ice, but nothing in the green of nature reminds us that not long ago this terrain was in the grasp of winter.” (translation by Csepregi 2009)

In my experience this has tended to be followed up by pointing out that actually the tide has turned, and that by now there are more speakers of Khanty than there were 120 years ago, up to about 10,000 (and still more Khanty people; about 30,000 by the latest Russian census).

This summer I have however gotten and read Ostjakit, a 1983 compilation of Karjalainen’s travelogues. This adds a new level of context I was not previously aware of: that the quote was written at a point when he had so far only visited the Southern Khanty, living along the river Irtysh and its tributaries Konda and Demyanka. Now, all of today’s decently numerous Khanty are rather a part of the northern and eastern groups… while the southern variety has indeed become an extinct language over the course of the 20th century, passing away without even a clear date of death sometime during the dark Soviet years, when field research was limited quite strictly and even then usually only to Eastern Bloc researchers. I do not dare to claim if the southern sub-ethnicity is totally extinct/assimilated, or has merely undergone language shift to Russian. Still, Karjalainen does not seem to have been too much off in his assessment after all.

(The travelogues contain many other quite quotable passages as well. I may translate and post some more of them later on.)

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Shifting senses of “Finnish”

Fairly extensive use of the term “Finnish” goes also further than just on where and how to divide the northern Finnic dialect continuum. All thruout the 1800s, “Finnish” or “Western Finnish” was still commonly extended not just to Karelian and Ingrian, but also to the other Finnic languages, i.e. Estonian, Votic, Livonian and Veps. And also wider yet: thus in the term “Finno-Ugric”! Today we parse this as labeling two extremes, but originally it was more akin to “Indo-European”: everything in the family spoken west of the Urals and north of Moscow (Sami, Mordvin, Mari, Udmurt, Komi) was considered by at least some scholars to be a part of the “Finno-” half; sometimes even Khanty and Mansi in Siberia. (I have never seen Hungarian explicitly included, but that could well have also happened sometimes.) This still lives on in, at minimum, the somewhat confusing concept of “Volga Finns”. It‘s also not much more than an interesting accident that it was"Finno-Ugric” that got standardized around the turn of the century, not any of the other contenders such as “Hungaro-Ugric” (magyar-ugor), “Chudic” (tschudisch) or the now again popular “Uralic“.

This was all mainly in linguistics and ethnography though: there were surely some “Finnish” nationalists who were basically analogues of e.g. pan-Slavicists or pan-Turkists, but for practical reasons most limited themselves to working within Finland as already established administratively (even Karelianism was more of a cultural than a practical political movement).

Further back in time still, even the concept of suomalaiset as “Finnish” was once an innovation. "Finn” is originally from a Germanic term that probably at first applied mainly to more eastern groups of Sami living in the territory of modern Finland — but, by the time standardization on these matters kicked in, the Sami had been pushed off much further north (probably the last more southern pockets were assimilated by the Savonian slash-and-burn-farming-driven expansion in the 1600s). The people living in what had been “Finland” since the Viking Age were now the suomalaiset, hämäläiset etc. who then naturally got reassigned as the “Finns” or “Finlanders”. This may sound undiscerning, but even the sápmelaš/suomalainen distinction in general was not made with too much consistency by the Scandinavians until the late Middle Ages; and it would take until the 1800s before it was done on ethnolinguistic and not vague livelihood-based ones! Before this all non-settled hunter, fisher, nomad etc. groups were equally labeled as “Lapps”: a now outdated term which still spent the rest of the 19th and most of the 20th as a synonym for “Sami”, despite protests. “Finn”, then, was later on roughly the agricultural analogue — whatever people there lived in the northern and eastern provinces who were indeed settled, yet but not a part of Norse or some other “better defined” nation. In practice this definition has almost complete overlap with “Finnish” as understood today, but of course this is no accident, seeing how Swedish rule is what initially ended up strenghtening various inter-tribal connections to the point that they could be forged into a single modern nation-state.

[africanrenaissance]

Suggested Resources

I figured I’d make a comprehensive list of resources for anyone looking for credible and quality outlets and platforms to do research; museums, libraries, archives, publishers, journals, organized learning, blogs, scholarly search engines, etc. Anything from art to books or whatever else related to black/African history.

I also added a list of my favorite Tumblrs as well. All of these resources and blogs are of course subject-related; some much less than others or much more vague in terms of what you can find, such as archives and general libraries, where you’ll have to put forth an effort. You can always ask me for specific books and so forth as well.

I can’t even begin to explain how utterly frustrating it was adding all these links, switching between Markdown and Rich text formatting on the, quite frankly, shitty app, my phone’s browser, and Evernote…(if you missed my previous PSA, my laptop screen is cracked). So, here is a list of resources I’ve found to be very beneficial, organized, and credible in general or from my own research, and hopefully for you:

JSTOR

Academia

Google Scholar

Project MUSE from the Johns Hopkins University Press

Africa Knowledge Project (West Africa Review)

Academia for anthropologist, and West Africa Review contributor, Dr. Dana Reynolds-Marniche

Oxford Academic

BiblioVault

UNESCO World Heritage Centre

Social Science Research Network (SSRN)

ScienceDirect

Portico

British Library

African Online Digital Library

Google Books

Library of Congress

National Library of France (BnF Gallica)

Berlin State Library (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin)

HathiTrust Digital Library

Digital Library of India

The European Library

The Nation Library of Israel

Qatar National Library

World Digital Library

Digital Library of America

Smithsonian Libraries Digital Library

Biblioteca Nacional de España (National Library of Spain)

British Library Endangered Archives Programme (Collections: Africa)

Internet Archive

The Internet History Sourcebooks Project (IHSP) from Fordham University

The Tomboctou Manuscripts Project

Library of Congress’ Ancient Manuscripts from the Desert Libraries of Timbuktu exhibit

Oxford Text Archive

Ottoman Imperial Archives

Livius

British Library blogs

Afro-Asiatica: An Odssey in Black (presented by anthropologist Dr. Dana Reynolds-Marniche)

Metropolitan Museum of Art: Timeline of Art History Essays

Khan Academy

Ta Neter Foundation

Moorish Science Temple of America

Smithsonian Mag: History

South African History Online

Artstor

The Artstor Blog

Wikimedia Commons

The Africa Image Library

The Digital Walters (from the Walters Art Museum)

Getty Images

The Getty Research Institute

Orientalistart.net

Orientalist-art.org

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Rijksmuseum Rijksstudio (Museum of the Netherlands, online collections)

Art Institute of Chicago’s African Collections

The Walters Art Museum

British Museum

Cleveland Museum of Art

Art Renewal Center Museum

Musée du louvre

Musée du louvre, Abu Dhabi

Musei Vaticani (Vatican Museums) - (Mobile browsers will need to put the site in desktop mode to open search links and fully load pictures.)

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The Getty Museum

The National Gallery, London

What I’d recommend as best resources out of this list: JSTOR, Academia, Google Scholar (use preferably to sifting through basic Google for ultra-specific things; Scholar will only give you academic results), UNESCO World Heritage Centre, British Library, National Library of France - BnF Gallica, HathiTrust Digital Library, Digital Library of India, Internet Archive, Fordham University’s IHSP, Livius, Afro-Asiatica: An Odyssey in Black (Dana Reynolds-Marniche’s content regarding ethnohistory and historiography on the Moors and Berbers/Amazigh is really great), Wikimedia Commons, The Africa Image Library, Met Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Musée du louvre.

It is wise to make good use of them all.

Tumblrs:

@medievalpoc (People of Color in European Art History)

@kayleekarusarsa

@met-africa-oceania (Met Museum Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas)

@africanstories

@ukpuru

@illustrious-divinity (more content on his Instagram account)