Birth
The hagiographies say that the Taiguano Prophetess was once the daughter of a petty Haitian nobleman.
The name of Prophetess’s family goes unmentioned in any of our sources. The early Taiguano elite must have wanted to avoid anyone other than the Prophetess’s direct descendants, the dynasty of the Camaicids, from claiming hereditary authority. We do not even know from which kingdom of Haiti she came, and all five claimed her birthplace.
Her birth—traditionally dated to September 17, 1342, the date 11.6.0.0.0 in the Maya Long Count calendar—was miraculous, say most hagiographers. The moment she was born, ghostly songs issued from the dust of the air and petals descended like rain from the sky. The feathers of exotic birds whirled around her parents, and a stylus of light hovered above the clouds, inscribing patterns of geometry on the dome of the heavens.
This miracle birth was doubted by some of the more learned theologians, who pointed out that Lord Bacocolon, the Taiguano god, was no conjurer who would resort to the supernatural. But no matter how much they decried these superstitions, the common people continued to believe.
However, even the most cynical of the theologians accepted as gospel one incident in the Prophetess's infancy. Soon after her birth, everyone knew, her mother was visited by two old men. One had tears in his eyes; the other, smile lines around them.
"Lords, why do you cry and why do you smile?" The mother asked.
"The fate of your child will be most wretched among all people on earth," the crying man said, "and I weep for her."
"That is true," said the other man, "but it will be a life as noble as it is wretched, and I smile for her."
Childhood
The Prophetess was a prodigy. She learned to speak at the age of one month, read and wrote by the age of six months, and composed perfect poetry before she was two years old.
Like all little girls, the Prophetess delighted in her parents, and they delighted in her. Every time guests came to her household, her parents would talk of nothing but their daughter: see how smart she is, how beautiful she is, how eloquent, how elegant, how unique... And even the most skeptical of their guests could only marvel when they came face-to-face with the child, the three-year-old girl who spoke to them in metered rhyme. "This girl has been blessed by the gods," everyone said.
The Prophetess had only one sibling, a brother older by eight years. The boy's name was Guaiqui. Had Guaiqui been a meaner boy, he would surely have been jealous of his little sister, but the child's heart was too tender for that. The boy loved the Prophetess as much as her parents did, feeding her sweets and laughing to see her laugh, marveling too at how intelligent his little sister was. Whenever the other boys bragged about what they had, Guaiqui would always say, "But
you don't have a little sister like mine!"
When the Prophetess was seven years old and Guaiqui fifteen, her parents showed her the idols and took her to the blood sacrifices. She was terrified of the priests and their blood-reeking attire and the ugly idols they served and how they tore the heart out of the poor man. As the priests raised the still-beating heart on the stool, the girl ran out the temple.
Her parents and brother found her cowering under a rock, and her face was in tears.
"Mother, father," she whispered, "don't worship the idols, don't sacrifice for them ever again—look, mother, they're just stone and wood, they can't move themselves, can't feed themselves, they are nothing like what people are—the gods in the temple are incapable of anything on their own, don't sacrifice people for them."
Her parents said, "You will understand in time."
She said, "No! I wish I'll never understand."
And Guaiqui stood silently. When his parents left, he hugged his sister and she hugged him back, and the Prophetess knew that things would be alright.
Adolescence
After her flight from the temple, the guests no longer thought that the Prophetess was blessed by the gods. They began to whisper that perhaps she was possessed by the ghost of some foul heretical scholar, some phantom who had chosen to possess a poor girl's body rather than slink off into the land of the dead.
Her parents and brother were undaunted. They always spoke of the Prophetess as the best daughter and sister they could have, no matter how much the people whispered. One day, when Guaiqui was seventeen and married, his new wife asked him, "Why do you love your sister so much? They say bad things about her."
"She is my little sister," he said, "How could I not love her?"
By the time the Prophetess was fourteen years old, she never went to the temple at all and never spoke of the gods. Instead she talked of another god, one she called Bacocolon. This god, she explained, was the patron of humanity. A long time ago, the world had no humans. Because there were no humans, there was no generative force; everything was either stagnant or being destroyed. The god Bacocolon had mercy on the world and created humanity, so that they could create anew and thus maintain the world.
Humans were therefore the most noble thing on earth, and it was a terrible sin to be sacrificing human lives for false gods.
The idol-priests heard her words and were outraged. They began to barricade her house, telling her parents to drag her out in chains so that she could be sacrificed for her blasphemies. Otherwise the gods would curse them terribly. Her parents were still idolaters, and the gory detail of the curses that the priests shouted out unnerved them to the core of their bones. But her father said,
"Even if, as the priests say, our feet were to be burnt black and our eyes were to sink in sea water—even if, as they say, we will be buried alive in earth—we cannot give up our daughter."
And her mother said,
"That is right; we love her."
And together the parents climbed up the roof of the house and shouted, "Sacred priests! We know we are doing a grave wrong in the face of the gods, and we will take whatever punishments the mighty gods dole out, but we cannot dare sacrifice the daughter who we love."
Eventually the priests dissipated.
Captivity
In the Age of Caciques, say the hagiographers, even Yucayans were taken slaves as if they were mere savages.
When the Prophetess was sixteen years old, the slavers came. They took an entire border village of serfs captive, one hundred forty-seven men and one hundred one women and two hundred seventy-two children. Because the captors already had enough serfs for their own purposes, they decided to sell them to Mayapán.
The nobleman who had owned this village presented himself to the royal court and said, "My honored king! I have been dispossessed of my possessions."
The king compensated him with a new town of serfs.
The next day, the lone refugee from the enslaved village came and said, "My honored king! I have been dispossessed of my home and companions and family."
The king said, "How dare such a filthy and lowly creature come to my regal court! His stink is too much to bear; have him carried off!"
The man wept and asked, "My king, can you do nothing?"
The king said, "It is the invariable principle of the world that the strong take and the weak are taken, that the strong possess and the weak are dispossessed."
The Prophetess heard the news and went to the slaver ship. She traced her noble lineage before them, and they were astonished of her lofty pedigree. Then the Prophetess said that she would willingly enslave herself if the five hundred and thirty were set free. She knew that the Maya paid much higher for noblewomen. The slavers accepted. The serfs were emancipated.
The Prophetess's family heard the news and rushed to the ship, tumbling on their tears. Her father said in a shaking voice, "I will buy her back for six hundred of my serfs."
The slavers considered the proposal when the Prophetess shouted, "I refuse, father! I am one person, not six hundred."
The Prophetess's father cried, "Girl,
you barely understand! Do you not know what they do to women on the slave ships?"
The Prophetess said, "I know, father. I have read about it all, and I have seen it all with my own eyes: the abuse, the bruises, the broken voices, the bodies thrown into the sea. I know as much as you do," and her voice cracked as she said this .
The Prophetess's mother said, "So you know, my daughter. You know, so how could you do this to yourself?"
The Prophetess said, "Because I knew. And they were one hundred and one women, and I was one."
And the Prophetess's mother could not say another word. At long last her father spoke again, asking the slavers for a final moment with his daughter. The slavers acquiesced. The Prophetess's father gave his daughter a single nightshade berry. She looked at it, wondering, and her father said, "This is a special breed of nightshade. It kills swift and painlessly."
Guaiqui had been silent all the while. And as the ship left, Guaiqui finally shouted out, "I love you, sister." And the Prophetess said that she loved him too.
Abuse
The hagiographers usually describe in detail the physical and sexual violence that the Prophetess endured at the hands of the slavers. This cruelty was central to later Taiguano theology; even after such trauma at the hands of her fellow humans, the Prophetess did not lose her faith in humanity and in the god of humanity. As this text is not a Taiguano hagiography, we see little reason we should list the gory details.
One night, following days of soul-breaking abuse, the Prophetess lay chained and contemplated the berry she had hidden away. It looked very appetizing. She opened her mouth, painfully—her face was all bruised—she regretted everything. She remembered her mother and her father, and her brother Guaiqui, who had said he loved her. She wept bitterly.
Her tongue rolled out and touched the glistening black of the berry.
Then the god Bacocolon was before her. He did not speak. But she understood and cast the berry aside.
The next day, the ship arrived at the port of Mayapán.
