Istwa Nou

Religion in pre-Columbian Puerto Rico was practical business. P. G. Roe describes the shaman as the person who moved between the human world and the world of spirits, and whose work bore directly on fertility, on health and on whether the crops came in. The equipment included carved arm bones and pierced teeth, worked into instruments that made spiritual power usable. Decoration on such objects mixes animal and human form, drawing on a body of myth shared from the Orinoco country of South America out through the Antilles, which is the route the ancestors of these communities had travelled. The chiefdoms of the island were theocratic, meaning the authority that ordered the fields and the authority that addressed the spirits were the same authority. A bad season was therefore a political event. This is the religious world that entered the European record as superstition, described by men who had come to replace it.