Stone Spirits, Part 1 of 3. By Livity.Blog
Picture a stone small enough to rest in your palm. It is shaped like a low mountain, three points rising and falling, and on one end a face looks back at you. To the people who carved it, this was not a decoration and not an idol in the way the Spanish would later insist. It was a home. Something lived inside it.
The Arawak peoples of the islands called that something a zemí, sometimes written cemí. The word named both the spirit and the object that held it. A zemí could be a god of the cassava field, a mother of the waters, a grandmother who had crossed over. It could be carved from stone, wood, bone or shell, or woven from cotton. What made it a zemí was not the material. It was the relationship.
A spirit written down in 1498
Most of what the written record holds about zemís comes from one man. In 1498, on Columbus's orders, a Hieronymite friar named Ramón Pané went to live among the Arawak peoples of Hispaniola and record their beliefs. His short account is the first book written in the Americas about the people who already lived here. Through it we learn that families kept zemís in their homes, that chiefs kept powerful ones in special houses, and that a zemí could speak, heal, punish, protect and bring rain.
Pané wrote as an outsider, sent by the men who were already enslaving the people he was describing. His account is precious and it is partial. Both things are true, and we read him with both in mind.
The three-pointers
The most recognizable zemís are the three-pointed stones, called trigonoliths. Some are plain. Others carry a face at one end and folded legs at the other, as if a being were crouched inside the mountain of the stone. Many are linked to Yúcahu, the spirit of cassava and the sea, the giver of the bread that fed the islands. They are often described as being buried in the conucos, the raised cassava fields, to make the earth generous.
Beside Yúcahu stood his mother, Atabey, mother of fresh waters, of the moon and of childbirth. She is often shown with the body of a woman and the bent legs of a frog, squatting in the posture of birth. When we talk about the mothers that history tried to erase, Atabey is one of the oldest of them, carved in stone long before the first ship arrived.
Cohoba and the duho
A zemí was something you visited, not just something you kept. In the cohoba ceremony, a cacique or behique (a healer and keeper of sacred knowledge) fasted, purified, and inhaled cohoba powder from a platform on the zemí itself. In that state, the zemí spoke. Advice, warnings, healing and prophecy passed between the living and the spirit world through the object.
Not a bowl
Look at the top of this figure. A crouching ancestor, ribs showing, teeth and eyes inlaid with shell, and on its head a round, flat platform. Museums catalogue it as a cohoba stand and call that platform the bowl that held the sacred powder. Look again, and it reads as something else: a seat, carried on the ancestor's head.
Africa knows this shape well. The Luba people of the Congo carve royal stools in which a woman, an ancestor, holds the seat up on her head and hands. Those stools were treated as containers of the chief's spirit, wrapped in white cloth and kept hidden rather than used every day, and the woman who carries the seat stands for the ancestral mothers through whom Luba succession passes. Set the Luba stool beside this zemí and the two figures answer each other across the ocean: an ancestor bearing up the place where power is received. That is my reading, offered beside the museum's, not in place of it. Whether the platform held powder, held a person, or held both, the meaning rhymes. The ancestor carries what is placed on top of them.
And the cacique did not stand for the cohoba ceremony. He sat, on a duho. Duhos were low ceremonial seats carved from dark, glossy hardwood or from stone, curved so the body could lean back almost as if in a hammock. At the front of many there is a carved head, made in the same style as the zemís, a god or an ancestor looking outward while the person seated behind it travels inward. Some were inlaid with gold in the eyes, mouth and ears. Only caciques and ritual specialists sat on them, and some were buried beside the cacique who had used them. The duho was not furniture. It was the place where a person sat in the lap of the ancestors.
The seat of the ancestors, around the world
Once you see the duho this way, you start to see it everywhere.
On the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea, the Iatmul people carve the teket, the orator's stool. It looks like a chair, but no one sits on it. It stands in the men's ceremonial house, its back rising into a carved figure, often understood as a clan ancestor whose spirit occupies the seat. When men debated clan histories and sacred names, a speaker struck the stool with a bundle of leaves to drive home each point. You did not argue alone. You argued in front of the ancestor, and the ancestor witnessed what you said.
In Ghana, the Asante nation keeps the Golden Stool, Sika Dwa Kofi. Asante tradition holds that around 1700 the priest Okomfo Anokye called it down from the sky into the lap of the first Asantehene, Osei Tutu, and that it holds the sunsum, the soul, of the whole Asante people. No one, not even the king, sits on it, and it is never allowed to touch the bare ground. When the British governor demanded to sit on it in 1900, the Queen Mother Yaa Asantewaa led the war that bears her name. Beside it, the stools of departed chiefs are blackened and kept in stool houses as shrines, so that each ancestor still has a seat among the living. Further south, in the Congo, the Luba ancestor-mothers keep holding up the royal seat.
In Scotland, kings were made upon the Stone of Destiny, the Stone of Scone, a block of sandstone. In 1296 the English king Edward I carried it south and had a wooden throne, the Coronation Chair, built around it so that English monarchs would be crowned seated over Scotland's sacred stone. It was used again at the coronation of 2023. Since its return to Scotland in 1996 it has been held there, and it is now displayed at Perth Museum. In Ireland, on the Hill of Tara, stands the Lia Fáil, the Stone of Destiny of the Irish high kings, said in legend to cry out when the rightful king touched it.
Tribal connections
Seat and stone. Lap and mountain. Across oceans that these peoples never crossed to meet each other, the same knowing appears: authority is not something a person owns. It is something you borrow from those who came before, and you borrow it by sitting with them, on them, before them. The cacique on his duho, the zemí carrying its platform, the Luba mother holding up the king's stool, the Iatmul orator striking the teket, the Asante king who will never sit on the Golden Stool, the Scottish king seated on his stone, the three-pointer buried in the cassava field so the ancestors could feed the children. Each is a way of saying the dead are still here, and they are still holding us up.
I don't read these as one people copying another. The historians are right that there is no evidence these traditions came from a shared source, and I keep that line clear. My own reading, and it is my interpretation, is that they are the same human memory surfacing in different hands: tribal peoples everywhere understood that a stone or a carved seat could be a doorway, and that the doorway had to be kept. Colonial powers understood it too. That is why they took the stones, demanded to sit on the stools, and put the zemís behind glass.
When the ancestor is inside
Some zemís held more than a spirit. In a museum in Turin, Italy, there is a figure woven from cotton, and inside it is a human skull. It is an ancestor, literally carried within the zemí. Holding it would have meant holding a grandparent. It stands about 70 centimeters tall, was made on Hispaniola around the fifteenth or sixteenth century, and is believed to be the only cotton zemí of its kind to survive. In 2021, the Dominican Republic announced it would ask Italy to return it.
Stolen, all over the world
Today zemís sit in the British Museum, the Smithsonian, the Penn Museum, the Met, collections across Europe, and on the auction market, where three-pointers are sold by the thousand. Each one was once in someone's home or field or chief's house. And the Caribbean is not alone. The taking of sacred objects happened everywhere the empires went.
The clearest example is Benin. In February 1897, a British punitive expedition attacked Benin City, in what is now southern Nigeria. Soldiers burned the city, sent the Oba into exile, and carried off thousands of brass plaques, carved ivories and cast heads from the royal palace and its ancestral altars. These were not trinkets. Many were made to honor and remember past Obas and Queen Mothers. They were the kingdom's ancestral archive, cast in metal. The British auctioned many of them to cover the cost of the raid, and the Benin Bronzes scattered into museums and private collections across Europe and America.
More than a century later, the tide has started to turn. In 2022, Germany signed an agreement transferring ownership of more than a thousand Benin Bronzes in its museums to Nigeria, and the first pieces were flown home that December. American institutions, including the Smithsonian, have returned theirs. The British Museum, which holds the largest collection, still has more than nine hundred, and British law has so far kept them there.
The Stone of Destiny went home to Scotland after seven hundred years. The Golden Stool was never surrendered at all; the Asante hid it rather than give it up. The Benin Bronzes are coming home slowly, piece by piece. So it is worth asking, gently and seriously: who keeps the Caribbean's ancestors now, and who should?
Not extinct
For centuries the colonial record declared the Arawak peoples of the islands extinct by the mid-1500s. The paper said they were gone. But the people did not all vanish; many were renamed. Genetic studies have since found Indigenous maternal ancestry in a large share of Puerto Ricans living today, and families across the Caribbean carry the foods, words and ways of the first peoples.
My own reading, and I say it as my interpretation rather than as settled history, is that much of what was called extinction was reclassification: a stroke of the pen that turned Indigenous mothers into "mestiza," "parda" or simply into no one. The zemí is a reminder that the spirits were never only in the stone. They were in the families. They still are.
Next in Stone Spirits: Sacred Stones, from Yurumein to Sweetwater to Newgrange, where we follow these spirits from the palm of the hand to carved slabs and boulders, including a mysterious figure in Georgia that some say looks Caribbean.
Stay tuned, family. One love. 🌳
0 commentaire