A History of the World in 100 Objects (56 page)

The term ‘Taino’ is generally used to describe the dominant group of people that inhabited the larger Caribbean islands: Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico and Hispaniola (now divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic), where our stool was found. Across the islands ritual artefacts have been found that give us some idea of Taino life and thought. There are face-like masks, for example, designed to be worn on the body, wooden statuettes and inhalers for sniffing a mind-altering substance. The most evocative of all these surviving traces of the Taino are the carved ceremonial stools known as
duhos
. They are the physical expression of a distinctive Taino world view.

The Taino people believed that they lived in parallel with an invisible world of ancestors and gods, from whom their leaders could seek knowledge of the future. A
duho
would be owned only by the most important members of a community, and it was the vital means of access to the realm of the spirits. It was in one sense a throne, but it was also a portal and a vehicle to the supernatural world.

It is about the size of a foot stool – a small curved seat carved out of rich dark wood, highly polished and gleaming. Carved at the front is a grimacing, goggle-eyed creature that looks almost human, with an enormous mouth, wide ears and two arms planted on the ground, which form the front two legs of the stool. From there a broad curve of wood sweeps upwards, like a wide beaver tail, supported at the back by two more legs. This creature looks like nothing on Earth – but one thing is certain: it’s male. Underneath this strange composite being and between the hind legs are carved male genitals.

The grimacing face of the stool’s half-human, half-animal creature

This is a seat for a leader – for the chief of a village or a region. Taino leaders could be either male or female, and the
duho
embodied their social, political and religious power; it was crucial to their function in society. In at least one instance a leader was buried sitting on his
duho
. Dr José Oliver, an archaeologist who has been doing new work on the Taino, explains how
duhos
would have been used:

The
duho
is not a piece of furniture but rather a symbolic location of where the chief would stand. This particular object is too small for a human being to sit on it. What is interesting is that all the wooden seats that we know of in the Caribbean, including this one, tend to be male or they are marked with the male gender, and sometimes show the male genitalia under the seat. That’s because this seat is actually an anthropomorphic personage. Think of it as a human being on four legs and what you sit on is the back of this personage. You sit on top almost like you are sitting over a donkey or a horse. So the chief is mounting this object, which happens to also be a sentient being. They thought of these things as having a
cemi
, that is, a soul.

So the gaping, boggle-eyed figure at the front of our seat, humanoid but not human, is the link to the
cemi,
to the
spirit or the ancestor.

One of the chief’s key roles was to access the domain of the sacred, the realm of the
cemis
. Seated, or perched, on the
duho
, he sniffed a hallucinogenic snuff made from the charred seeds of the
cohoba
tree. It begins to work within half an hour, and the resulting effects last for two to three hours, creating colourful patterns, strange sounds and voices, leading to full dream-like hallucinations.

One of the early Spanish recorders of the Taino culture, and probably the most sympathetic, was Bartolomé de las Casas. He arrived on
Hispaniola in 1502 and described the rituals in which the
duho
had its role – he calls the chief a Lord:

They had the custom of convening meetings to determine arduous things, such as mobilizing for war and other things that they thought important for performing their
cohoba
ceremony. The first to start was the Lord, and while he was doing it the rest remained quiet and were absorbed while seated on low and well-carved benches they call
duhos
. Having done his
cohoba
(which is inhaling through the nostrils those powders), he remained for a while with his head turned sideward and with his arms resting on his knees. He would give them an account of his vision, telling them that the
cemi
spoke to him and certified the good or adverse times to come, or that they would have children or that they would die, or that they would have conflict or war with their neighbours.

The Taino world was run by chiefdoms – centres of power whose leaders fought, negotiated and allied among themselves. They generally lived in settlements of a few thousand people, in large circular houses, each accommodating perhaps a dozen families, clustered around a central square. The chief’s house, which would also double as the local sacred space or temple where the
duho
was put to work, would stand some distance away.

We don’t know who would have made these
duhos
, but certainly the materials were very deliberately chosen. The wood of the
duho
is native to the Caribbean, and it fascinated the Europeans who encountered it. They called it
lignum vitae
– the ‘wood of life’ – because of its remarkable qualities. Its resin was used to treat a wide range of ailments, from sore throats to syphilis. It is also one of the few woods so dense that it sinks in water. One Spaniard wrote admiringly of the
duhos
: ‘they are made of such beautiful, smooth and perfect wood, that nothing else more beautiful was ever made of gold or silver.’

Actually, there is gold on our
duho
as well. The wide gaping mouth and the straining, boggling eyes of the humanoid head at the front are emphasized by being inlaid with gold discs, adding enormously to the frightening power of the object. It was gold like this that made the Spaniards believe that they might find in Hispaniola the treasure they had been hoping for. They were disappointed: gold in the Dominican Republic is found only in the rivers, in small quantities accumulated over many generations. Like the special wood, this rare, precious gold marked out the
duho
as an exceptional object, something able to mediate between the earthly and the supernatural worlds.

It could also mediate between living leaders. Important visitors would be ceremonially seated on
duhos
, and Christopher Columbus himself received this honour. But of all the futures that could have been foretold by the Taino chiefs sitting on their
duhos
, nothing could have matched what actually happened. The Spaniards brought with them smallpox and typhoid – and even the common cold was catastrophic to the Taino communities, who had no immunity. Those who survived were resettled by the Spanish, so kinship groups were torn apart, and then African slaves were brought in to replace the vanishing local labour force.

How much of the Taino inheritance, or identity, survived? In the Caribbean today this is the subject of much contentious public debate. Professor Gabriel Haslip-Viera, author of
Taino Revival
, considers the claims of those who say they are of Taino descent:

The Taino people as a pure ethnic group essentially came to an end by 1600, about a hundred years after the arrival of the Spaniards. The small number of survivors essentially mixed in with the Spanish colonists and the Africans that were brought into the Caribbean to replace them as the main labour force. Because primarily the mixture in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean is an African/European mix, that’s what has been coming out in the recent studies, the so-called admixture tests that geneticists have been doing in recent years. Those tests have demonstrated overwhelmingly that the peoples of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, of the Greater Antilles, are people of mixed background and that the mixture is primarily European and African.

The Taino may have been virtually wiped out hundreds of years ago, but we still have echoes of the lost Taino world in a few words familiar to us, words which reflect Taino experience and culture: hurricane, barbecue, hammock, canoe and tobacco. These are, in the Caribbean context, everyday things, but the physical survivals of the Taino world, like the
duho
stool, speak of the universal human need to connect with what is beyond the local, with the world of spirits and gods. This constant human need provides the unifying theme for my next choice of objects.

Across the world different religious systems used objects to bridge the gap between the human and the divine, to aid the dialogue between individuals, communities or even empires and their gods. In the western Christian Church, pilgrims flocked to shrines to see holy relics, including the body parts of saints. In the eastern Orthodox Christian Church, images of Jesus and the saints were venerated in the form of icons. Hindu worshippers in India used temple statues to develop personal relationships with individual Hindu gods. In Huastec Mexico, penitents visited statues of the mother goddess asking for cleansing and forgiveness. In the Pacific, the religion of the Easter Islanders evolved to reflect their deteriorating environment: they stopped venerating statues of their ancestors and instead created a cult centred on the island’s diminishing bird population.

Around 600 years ago religion and society all round the world were so closely connected that it would have been impossible for most people to say where one ended and the other began. Perhaps that’s why unworldly hopes were so often articulated through worldly wealth – in temples and precious objects. It is a paradox that we see in extreme form in the Holy Thorn Reliquary. The reliquary was built to showcase what was believed to be one of the thorns from the Crown of Thorns placed on Christ’s head before the crucifixion – a relic of the utmost sanctity.

The crown itself is now held in the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris, but was originally housed in the Sainte-Chapelle, the palace church of the kings of France built in the 1240s to hold what were then the most precious objects in Europe – supreme among them, without question, the Crown of Thorns. For medieval Christendom the central purpose of life in this world was to secure salvation in the next. Relics of the saints offered a direct line to heaven, and no relics were more powerful, or more valuable, than those associated with the suffering of Christ himself. The amazing church of the Sainte-Chapelle, created to exhibit the king’s collection of relics, cost 40,000 livres to build; the Crown of Thorns alone cost the king over three times that amount. It was probably the most valuable thing in Europe. The most precious gift that the king of France could make was a single thorn detached from the crown.

One of those detached thorns is the centrepiece of the Holy Thorn Reliquary, a 20-centimetre (8-inch) high theatre made of solid gold and encrusted with jewels. In it we watch the terrifying drama of the end of the world, the day on which we, along with all the other dead, will be raised and will face judgement. This is a drama in which one day every spectator will be a participant. It is in three acts. At the bottom, as angels blow their trumpets at the Earth’s imagined corners, graves open on an enamel hillside of vivid green. Four figures – two men, two women, naked in white enamel and still in their coffins – look up and raise their hands in supplication. Far above them, at the very top of the reliquary, is God the Father sitting in judgement, among radiant gold and precious gems. In between is the focus of the whole reliquary.