Cacibayagua

Cacibayagua por Tanya Torres

Cacibayagua por Tanya Torres, oil on canvas, 20" x 16", 2012.

"From Cacibayagua came the majority of the people who settled the island." Fray Ramón Pané 

The very first poem of Marianela's book Diosas de la Yuca, contains this quote. 

I thought the cave Cacibayagua, from which the original taínos of La Española, sister island of Puerto Rico, are said to have come, might be a place of earth and river water from whose veins flows life.

I was sitting in a church, listening to a group of monks sing. A group of nuns were sitting next to me praying and adoring the Eucharist. While meditating, I saw in my mind some paintings like this one, but much bigger, and depicting the whole body full of flowers and creatures and plant life. Although they look nothing like the Virgin Mary, I know she is present in them.

Don't most of the miraculous images of the Virgin Mary appear by water? Isn't she the Star of the Sea, Stella Maris? Don't people go to her shrine in Lourdes to bathe in the blessed water of her grotto and heal? Water, cave, virgin goddess, like the ancient Goddess.

As writer Marion Zimmer Bradley would have said, "all goddesses and all gods are as one." The Taíno had their own. My european ancestors had theirs. I honor them all.

***

I hope the images of Heaven and Earth will help bring more peace, love and joy into our world through a different viison of the old ideas that grow out of the human heart, and are ever present in our perception of the world as human beings.

Reproductions available in my Etsy Shop