PARALLELS IN MAYA AND TAINO HATCHET TRANSFORMATION DEITIES

The Ceremonial Taino petaloid hatchet and its relation to the Maya hatchet god Kawil
Miguel A Sague Machiran

Until recently the only meaning that I saw in the ceremonial
hatchets of the ancient Tainos was as a symbolic tool of Experience used by the deity of wisdom "Guakar", one of the means by which the ancient Tainos gained wisdom through harsh experience. The Taino word for ceremonial hatchet is "manaya". These so-called "petaloid celt" hatchets are very common and get their archeological name "petaloid" because the actual tear-like stone blade is shaped like a flower petal.
The petaloid hatchet blades have an interesting history in Cuba. On that island the Yoruba African people who were brought as
slaves by the Spanish, often found these stones in the fields as they
were working, and for reasons that until now seemed to elude me they
identified them with thunder-bolts, and associated them with their
Yoruba orisha-diety, Chango. In relation to this post I would like you to point out that as in the case of all of the other Regla De Osha orisha-deities, Chango has special colors which are unique to him. His colors are red and white. He is portrayed as wearing a red and white crown and carries a double-headed red and white hatchet in one hand.

Some time back I did a fairly thorough personal study of the Taino
hatchets in all of their manifestations. Most of my study was done with the help of the book by the Cuban archeologist Rene Herrera Fritot, titled Estudio De Las Hachas Antillanas. The many images of Taino hatches in the books that I was reading at the time gave me access to a very wide assortment of these objects and allowed me the opportunity to compare the many manifestations in which they were modelled.

As I mentioned earlier, most of these axes were created with a stone
blade, carefully ground and polished to the shape of a smooth petal-
shaped or tear-drop shaped celt. This blade was then fitted or hafted
into a wooden handle to create the traditional Taino hatchet. On rare
occasions a complete hatchet was fashioned out of one piece of stone,
carefully shaped and polished to look like the original objects which
in fact have a wooden handle. There seems to be a tendency for the Taino craftsman to sometimes replace the original material that was traditionally used to create a ritual object with another material. Sometimes wood is replaced with stone. In the case of the manaya the wooden handle is replaced by a stone one rendering an object that is totally made of stone.
I found one example of a beautifully crafted all-stone manaya in the
pages of one book. Curiously this particular piece had a
carefully and skillfully shaped human foot carved at the end of the
handle in place of the usual knob that you find there to keep the axe
handle from flying out of the user's hand in the midst of work. It
was as if the artist had an understanding of this object as being a
living deity, like a cemi, and provided it with a foot as all cemies
have. I have thought of this cemi hatchet a lot over the years. In
any case it is obvious that these hatchets were considered to have
spiritual significance because many of them have images of spirit
beings attached to them, mostly at the top, the "head" of the hatchet.

If you think of the hatchet as being a living sacred being, and you
image it as having parts of a body in the same way that a human being
has, then the bottom end of the handle (be it wooden or be it stone)
would be the foot (and it's obvious that the Taino ancestors saw that
part of the handle as a foot because of the example that I mentioned
before with the carving of the foot at the bottom end). The top end
would be the head and the petal-shaped blade would appear to be
piercing this "head". I mention all of these facts because they play
an important role in the more recent research that I have been doing
lately in the field of Maya symbology




It turns out that the Classic era Maya, according to Schelle and Frew
in their book Maya Cosmos worshipped a special deity now sometimes
identified as K'awil, who was imaged as a hatchet. He either had only
one leg (which in a way was imaged as the handle of the tool)or he
had two legs but one was a lot longer than the other (sometimes
ending in a snake head instead of a foot)and he appeared to be
spinning on his longer leg. This deity often was represented as
having the stone blade of a hatchet piercing his forehead and
oftentimes that blade was represented as a thunderbolt.

Remember that the Yoruba slaves in Cuba associated the Taino stone hatchet blades
that they found in the fields with thunderbolts of their orisha-deity
Chango. It is possible that the Tainos whom these Yorubas met when
they were brought to Cuba instructed them as to a relationship
between the hatchet and a Taino thunder spirit or storm spirit of
some kind. This could be the reason that the Yorubas associated the
stone axe-heads with Chango.

The Maya K'awil was a deity associated with transformation. He seems
to have been very strongly connected with the spiritual transition
that a leader underwent at the moment when he assumed the authority
of kingship. Oftentimes Classic Maya rulers would have themselves
represented on carvings with a K'awil axe-blade piercing their
forehead to symbolize a moment of deep personal transformation (for
example on the day when the king would assume the throne). Oftentimes
these stone celts sticking out of their foreheads would be shown
smoking to represent that these were not ordinary axe-heads, they
were fiery thunderbolt axe-heads.
The deity K'awil was represented as a human-like being but he was
also represented as a hand-held hatchet and as such the Maya drawings
of these hatchets look exactly like the Taino hatchets. It is
understood in the Maya symbology that the top of the hatchet is in
fact the head of K'awil pierced by the petal-shaped stone thunder-
bolt blade, while the bottom end is his one foot. Oftentimes the
images of these hatchets are decorated with glyph designs
called "cauak signs" These signs represent thunder. Nowadays the
modern manifestation of this spirit is a character in modern Quiche
Maya tradition called "Ah Itz" (loosely translated "Master of the
sacred substance") This character is personified by a man in special
regalia during traditional Mayan calendar ceremonies. His regalia
included red and white clothes, a red and white headress that looks very much like a crown and a red and white hatchet. His task during these ceremonies is to activate a special energy that the Quiches believe exists in their calendar day-keepers. This energy is referred to as "lightning in the blood". The Ah Itz
walk around the crowd during the ceremonies touching the holy day-
keepers and activating the lightning in their blood.

It is very probable that red and white were the colors already
associated with the thunder spirit Chango when the Yoruba came over
from Africa, but it is, in my opinion, possible also that these African immigrants associated the Taino stone hatchet with their spirit Chango because the Tainos told them that they also used the bright red achiote paint
called bija to represent thunder and transformation. It is possible
that they told the Africans that the hatchet was a spirit in itself,
a spirit of transformation related to the Maya K'awil. It is possible
that the Taino hatchet was a personified hatchet-shaped cemi, whose
forehead was pierced by a thunder-blade just like the Maya spirit K’awil.. Remember that there is now incontrovertible proof of physical cultural contact between the Tainos and the Mayas evidenced by the discovery of a Taino manatee-bone vomic spatula at the Maya site of Altun Ha in Belize by a Canadian archeological team.



The Maya worshipped a spirit that they called "Hun-Rakan" and
sometimes "Hurakan". For a long time I have attempted to discover
what relationship, if any, this spirit had with our own storm spirit
Hurakan.The fact that the Maya Hurakan also was associated with
spinning storms such as tornadoes and hurricanes seems to be strong
evidence that this spirit was shared in common by both the Tainos and
the Mayas and it would take further linguistic research to
figure out who had him first. I am inclined to suspect that the Mayas
acquired the belief in Hurakan from the Tainos.
The Mayas imaged the characteristics of Hurakan to be strongly associated
to those of K'awil. That is why they associated K'awil's gyrating
dance on his one foot with the turning, spiral of the tornado's lower
tip and with the spinning motion of the hurricane. So in a way the
Maya Hurakan was also seen as a spirit of transformation. There is also evidence that the spinning motion of the Big and Little Dipper constellations are likewise associated with the god Hun Rakan or Hurakan and the concept known as "Heart of Heaven". Is is important to note that research by John Major Jenkins indicates that the concept of "Heart of Heaven" may have historically shifted focus during the classic era from the Big/ Little Dipper constellation complex (which he associated to a spinning fire-drill cult) to the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy, but ancestral connections to the Dipper constellations and its star-spinning element may have persisted on some level in association to the veneration a deity who spins on one foot.

I believe that the Taino hatchet was more than just a sacred
ceremonial object or tool. I believe that it was perceived as a cemi,
a spirit of lightning and thunder in its own right just like the Maya
hatchet spirit K'awil. I believe that the ancient Tainos imaged this
spiritual being as a transforming character, who had the power to
take a person from one level of existance to another, changing that
person, transforming that person, perhaps in an evolutionary manner.

This is well in keeping with my belief that the manaya is the tool
of Guakar because I can not imagine a personal life-event more
transforming than a moment of experience involving the fundamental
concept of trial and error. I believe that Guakar with his manaya, was the spirit of Experience.