Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds by Warner Marina;

Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds by Warner Marina;

Author:Warner, Marina;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Unknown
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2002-07-15T00:00:00+00:00


Fig. 29 A few examples of statues called zemis, which were used to mobilize powers of prophecy, healing, and fertility, survived the iconoclasm of the missionaries (zemi, from Jamaica, izoo—1500).

Pané describes how doctors use the zemis to assure a harvest, call up a wind, make it rain—and heal the sick. He relates how the ‘behique’ or priest-doctors visit the sick, and how they both then purge themselves by sniffing a hallucinogenic called cohoba (which has not been identified for sure); it induces trance, in which state the priest-doctor contacts the zemis for a diagnosis. ‘Then he pulls hard on him [the sick man], as if he wished to pull something out … From there he goes to the exit of the house and closes the door, and he speaks, saying “Go away to the forest, or to the sea, or wherever you wish.” And … he sucks on the sick mans neck … “look how I have taken it [the cause] out of your body …”’ With great relish, Pané then goes on to relate in detail the vicious punishments meted out by the family to behiques who, after these sympathetic magical operations, failed to assure their patient’s survival.

Richard Eden, translating Peter Martyr, added a vivid simile to the account of the priest-doctor’s falling into trance: ‘he begynneth his inchauntment, and calleth the spirite with loude voyice by certayne names, whiche no man understandeth but hee and his disciples …’. He then slashes himself, Eden continues, ‘with a thorne’ and drinks a potion which makes him ‘waxeth hotte and furious … marvellously turmoylyng him selfe, as wee reade of the furious Sybilles, not ceassyng until the spirit be come: who at his comming entreth into him, and overthroweth him, as it were a greyhound should overturne a Squerell, then for a space, hee seemeth to lye as though hee were in a great payne, or in a rapte, woonderfully tormentyng him selfe …’ He continues, linking spirit possession with prophecy: ‘They [vegetarian cultists] gave them selves to the knowledge of naturall thinges, and used certain secrete magicall operations and superstitions, whereby they had familiaritie with spirites, which they allured into theyr owne bodyes at such tymes as they would take uppon them to tell of thinges to come …’ 34 The priest-doctors seem mostly to be male, however; in Suriname, on the Latin American coast, the mercenary John Gabriel Stedman did however describe ceremonies and serpent cults which had been outlawed, he writes: ‘these people have also amongst them a kind of Sibyls, who deal in oracles; these sage matrons dancing and whirling round in the middle of an assembly, with amazing rapidity, until they foam at the mouth, and drop down as convulsed … It is here called the winty-play, or the dance of the mermaid, and has existed from time immemorial…’35 Stedman then compares these prophetesses, he says, with Virgil’s sibyl.

But Peter Martyr, echoing Pané, set a trend when he ignored the healing intentions (and occasional efficacy) of



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