Land of Sweetness: A Pre-Columbian Timeline

Entry 27: Archaeology and the early Taiguano state
From “The Evolution of Pre-Taiguano Yucayan Society,” paper by Miquel Tlaxcualcuani and Izapella Cipactōnal

Columbus arrived in year 132 of the Anno Taivanico, which begins with the return of the Prophetess to Haiti in AD 1362. By that year there must have been few who could remember the early Taiguano state, that is, the kingdom’s history prior to the Paper Bonfire on AT 53 / AD 1414, a massive book burning that destroyed virtually all sources ever recorded in Haiti prior to that date.

The Taiguanos’ Orwellian justification for the Paper Bonfire has already been much made of:

May the old books burn, may their ashes scatter to the far reaches of the Earth.

We burn all these pages, full of lies and nothing more. These are falsehoods that the idols whispered to the shamans, the conjurers, and other sorts of gullible men. The idols are powerless by themselves. Can an idol move its hands to eat? Can it move its feet to walk and run? Yet they are very powerful for the foolishness of men. They whisper, as a prostitute whispers, ‘Feed me, move me, serve me as your master and be my slave.’ Man listens and obeys. He becomes the most abject slave of the idol, even though he could overthrow his master of wood and stone at any moment. He forgets Bacocolon. And men teach their children the whispering lies of the idols and write it down in books, so that all their descendants will be slaves evermore.

Burn, burn the teachings of the idols; may we be freed from their clammy stone hands.

The histories of the old kings are the histories of the idols; may we burn them, so the idols no longer be remembered by men. The songs of the old kings are the songs of the idols; may we burn them, so the idols no longer pollute our ears. The laws of the old kings are the laws of the idols; may we burn them, so the idols no longer decree our lives.

May the idols die. May their rites and their histories be forgotten to all humanity, and the idols thereby die a second death.

Bacocolon, accept the sacrifice of these idolatrous books, a worthy sacrifice.
Thankfully for historians, the Taiguanos never dreamed that there could be ways of systematically understanding the past other than through written and spoken testimony. Archaeology was spared by them, and it turns out to support very little of the traditional Taiguano account of the fourteenth century. Indeed, the only reliable element of the Taiguano story may be the dates given for Taiguano expansion; archaeology does strongly suggest that Xaragua was conquered in the 1360s, Maguana in c. 1380, and the rest of the island in c. 1400.


Who were the early Taiguanos?

Traditional accounts claim that the first Taiguanos were slaves from Mayapán who fled the turmoil of the civil war that brought Cemānāhuatēpēhuani to power. They took over the kingdom of Xaragua with the aid of the exiled mercenary-king Tēzcatl, initiating an ideological program that involved the pursuit of greater social equality and first introducing the worship of the deity Bacocolon, a culture hero and creator god. An attempt to restore the status quo by the other kings of Haiti was foiled in the 1367 Battle of Ximani, and over the next four decades all of the island came under the Prophetess’s direct administration.

For obvious reasons, archaeological work on the city of Cocopan has been difficult. However, the above-mentioned Pyramid of Bacocolon in the Maisi temple complex, which significantly predates the Taiguano state, suggests that the worship of the Feathered Lord as a god of cultural achievement had been an important element of state religion even in the Age of Caciques. Although it is impossible to reconstruct the cosmology of pre-fourteenth century Yucayan state cults, it is probable that the Taiguano cult of Bacocolon was nothing more than an amplification of practices whose basic elements predated any Prophetess.

Recent field surveys of fourteenth-century peasant households in twelve Xaragua village sites suggest that the livelihood of the rural population was virtually unchanged by the Taiguano takeover. There was no marked improvement in living standards as Taiguano sources purport, nor are the larger residences of elected village headsmen archaeologically identifiable, until the early fifteenth century more than four decades after the establishment of Taiguano control.

In the Age of Caciques, noble families had sent their minor sons to control village life directly rather than allow the peasants to elect their own representatives. The greater freedom of the fifteenth-century Haitian peasantry and Taiguano acquiescence to village autonomy – the vertical withdrawal of state power – thus correspond to the horizontal territorial expansion of Taiguano power across the entire island. The retreat of the state from village life, it turns out, is far better explainable as a logical response to the administrative burdens of ruling a state five times larger than any ever before than by any ideological commitment.

The fourteenth-century fortress of Huihozemi, as important as it is to the Taiguano account of events as the site of zealous defense against an overwhelming enemy, is archaeologically invisible. Surveys of the mountain, both extensive and expansive, have been conducted repeatedly to no avail. The surviving ruins there are the remnants of new constructions of the mid-sixteenth century.

According to Taiguano accounts, the four eastern kingdoms were integrated peacefully by the will of their final rulers. Yet the capitals of all four kingdoms were abandoned soon after Taiguano takeover, and in all four sites, archaeologists have found extensive signs of destruction around the time the Taiguanos took control. The royal palace complexes, in particular, are universally razed to the ground. Landscape archaeologists have identified a general decline in the number of peasant communities across the late fourteenth century, with the estimated population of the island of Haiti falling from 1,000,000 to some 800,000, one hitherto masked by the rapid surge in population during fifteenth-century Taiguano prosperity. Clearly there was significantly more bloodshed than the sources suggest.

Who then were the early Taiguanos? A key clue lies in a recent survey of the fourteenth-century capital of the Higuey kingdom, abandoned following the area’s takeover by the Taiguanos in 1404. As aforementioned, the capitals of early fourteenth-century Yucayan kingdoms were separated into several dozen neighborhoods, each inhabited by a specific noble lineage and the dynasty’s slaves and followers. The neighborhoods controlled by nitaino (upper nobility) dynasties and those under naboria (lower nobility) families are distinguishable in both scale and the artistic skill of their remains.

When Higuey was taken, every nitaino neighborhood was looted, then haphazardly destroyed. No luxury goods are to be found, presumably because they were categorically stolen during or after the destruction. On the other hand, evidence of systematic burning and of sudden and terminal depopulation is clear, and the ground was levelled afterwards. The naboria neighborhoods, however, were evacuated in an organized fashion, the buildings remained standing, and the dynastic palaces were on-and-off inhabited into the fifteenth century.

In 1414, the noblemen of Higuey destroyed all their ceramics with syllabic inscriptions in the Paper Bonfire. The survey identified the site of destruction in a nearby hillock and recovered the potsherds present. It was found that in all cases where dynastic names could be reconstructed, the lineages were naboria ones. The Taiguano conquest had purged the nitaino from positions of power and supplanted them with naboria.

The naboria were the principal merchant class in the Age of Caciques, to the point that archaeologists often use evidence of involvement in the grain export trade as a shorthand for identifying a neighborhood as naboria. While the presence of modern cities atop the Taiguano-era provincial capitals preempts a careful study of early Taiguano trading patterns, evidence from Mesoamerica suggests that trade between Haiti and Mesoamerica actually increased following the emergence of the Taiguano state. The naboria merchants, then, must have actively benefited from the coming of the Taiguanos.

The archaeological data suggests that the Taiguano revolution was not the enterprise of a small group of fleeing slaves motivated solely by their zeal, a story that strains credibility. (Our son’s impression that the Taiguano account is reminiscent of an Internet forum story may not be far off the mark.) Rather, it was a class conflict. The pre-Taiguano nobility of Haiti had been divided into two classes, the nitaino high nobility, whose income derived from land and slaves, and the naboria lower nobility, who formed the principal merchant class. The nitaino, headed by the Cacique and his royal family, dominated the political domain and venerated a large pantheon of Sweetness effigies. The naboria, who had accumulated great wealth through their mercantile connections, chaffed against the limitations in the system. Opposing themselves to the hierarchical ideals and polytheistic patrons of the nitaino class, the naboria began to call for greater social equality and identify themselves as devotees of the Feathered Serpent god, the foreign god of social mobility and human achievement.

The result was the Taiguano movement, a radical naboria revolution against the system.

This revisionist theory still leaves much open to discussion. How reliable are the Taiguano accounts that survive? Did the Prophetess exist? What role did the mercenary king Tēzcatl play, if any? What was the relationship between the Taiguano movement and the Maya civil war? These are all questions for which we have no answer yet.​
 
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The new batch of posts (Entries 24-27, and the soon-to-come 28 on Taiguano theology) finally introducing the eponymous nation of the TL should allow the attentive reader to make sense of some of the more oblique references in earlier posts back from June to August, such as:
 
That was incredible, I knowed that the religious accounts were heavely fictionaliced, yet the reveal surprised me in some ways. This is the best use of "the oficial religious history is fake" trope in media, is nice to see a story writed by someone who actually understands how societies and religions work.
 
When Colombus arrives in the new world it either he get killed on the spot or he gonna do what Cortez did with the Aztecs
 
yah it is going to be hard now though now to colonize
What I mean is that while a quite competent navigator, having reading parts of his daries, he doesnt seem the most socially competent person, being unable to understand that the natives werent giving him gifts out of the kindness of their hearts but because that was theier costum on meeting foreiners and he was supposed to also send them some gifts. I cant see him doing the diplomatic gambits of Cortez.
Also Colón has no troopes.
 
Considering OTL events in Haiti...
Though the haitian revolutionaries were not a few, had an excellent window of oportunity and the revolution was lead by the colored middle class freemen, and their zeal come from having really nothing to lose, slavery there wasnt like serfdom or even like cotton slavery, the sugar industry was a hell on earth.
 
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Considering OTL events in Haiti...
Not quite. The Haitian Revolution was a popular uprising, something the Taiguano movement was by their own admission not, and brought quick and dramatic change for Saint-Domingue's enslaved majority. Following the official account of events, the Taiguanos were slaves from somewhere else who (with relatively small-scale serf supporters) fortuitously gained control of the capital and then enacted radical top-down change of a nature that is archaeologically unsupportable. So there's a bit of a difference here.
 
Entry 28: Taiguano Theology
From World Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction

Sweetness. Central to the Taiguano faith was the concept of zemi, “Sweetness,” meaning the human will to think and act. All civilized humans were perceived to be embued with Sweetness, which distinguished their acts from the instinctive behaviors of animals.

Sweetness was not reason, though many Western scholars chose to see it so. Rather, it was what was uniquely human, including both passion and faith. On a more philosophical level, Sweetness was the root of generative and reasoned change, something humans alone were believed capable of. Most natural phenomena could not engender generative change; their behavior was either instinctual and led to a lack of change, or was destructive and led to degenerative change. But all human actions that came from Sweetness had a reason for them, whether rational or emotional. Both total predictability – which could only lead to lack of change – and total unpredictability – a sign of degenerative change – were inimical to Sweetness.

The Taiguanos believed that evil was instinctive and that Sweetness was what allowed humans to be good. Sweetness was thus a generally morally positive thing, although a distinction to be elaborated below was made between Cool Sweetness, Sweetness used to good ends, and Hot Sweetness, that with negative consequences. The Taiguanos also placed importance on White Sweetness, the state in which one was conscious of the existence of one’s own Sweetness. White Sweetness could only be achieved through education in the Taiguano faith, of course.

Most Taiguanos believed that Sweetness originated with the deity Bacocolon. Humans were originally like any other animal, unthinking and instinctive in their behavior and wildly destructive in their mentality. Bacocolon granted them the capacity for Sweetness and made them human, and to his chosen peoples in Mesoamerica and the Yucayans he also taught them the arts of civilization.

How, then, was Sweetness passed down? The Taiguanos believed that the capacity for Sweetness was manifested through an unknown physical substance that ran in human blood and semen and was passed down to children during conception. Yet Sweetness itself had to be taught through interactions with other humans, and indeed, each person’s Sweetness was in a constant state of flux according to the state of their relationships. The Taiguano was not an individual but a person whose Sweetness included “shards” of the Sweetness of all those who had left a lasting impression on him, and who himself had left behind a part of his Sweetness in those they had met.

There is no real analogue between Sweetness and the Abrahamic conception of the “soul.” The Taiguanos believed in a dual personhood, with the generative power of Sweetness opposed by a base, instinctive animal nature called the opia. The Sweetness was the seat of consciousness and emotion and the opia the seat of the subconscious, though the latter took conscious and even willful form as the evil Hot Sweetness. There was a constant state of conflict between the zemi and the opia. When a person died, the opia went to the underworld known as the Cave of Coabey and returned as bats, moths, and dangerous demons. But their Sweetness remained in the Sweetness of those they had influenced and in the taiguan they had contributed to – and, freed from the struggle with their opia, “the Sweetness is happy in the embrace of Bacocolon.”

The denial of Sweetness in animals was fundamental to Taiguano belief. More difficult was the fate of idols, which had previously been considered the locus of Sweetness in the world. The Taiguanos generally held that the idols themselves were powerless and inanimate, but that humans had “granted” them Sweetness by imagining that they possessed Sweetness. The worship of idols was thus Hot Sweetness, for it made humans – the only animals worth moral consideration – waste their Sweetness for no benefit, often to their active detriment. The Taiguanos held that humans should venerate each other alone, with Bacocolon as an extension of the human spirit. This culminated in the display at the Great Temple of Bacocolon, where a massive statue of the deity, dressed in full Yucayan royal regalia, chained and humiliated the Sweetness effigies of the old Caciques.

The question of whether inanimate forces of nature, such as the Sun and the stars, had Sweetness was also important. By 1492, the Taiguano elite did not generally believe that the celestial bodies were alive. Astronomical observations had yielded predictable results that made it clear that the Sun and Moon were at best mere animals bound to instinct. Wind and rain, however, seemed rather more alive, and both were extremely closely associated with the Mesoamerican Feathered Serpent god. Even the Taiguanos believed that the wind and rain were Sweetness-embued forces of Bacocolon that brought regenerative change upon the Earth at intervals that were neither excessively predictable and thus instinctive nor excessively unpredictable and thus mindless. Storms, droughts, and floods, however, posed a conceptual problem. The most common answer was that these disasters represented an unpredictability that was prevalent in the ancient world before the coming of Sweetness. Bacocolon tamed these disasters with his Sweetness, just as he elevated humanity with it.

The Taiguanos also debated whether all humans truly possessed Sweetness, although there was general recognition both that all humans at least had the capacity for Sweetness and that only Yucayans possessed White Sweetness. The problem was that the Caniba appeared clearly culturally inferior to both Yucayans and Yuzibacaneiri (Mesoamericans) despite both being biologically human. If Caniba civilization was lesser, how could their Sweetness be equal? Yet the fifteenth-century Taiguanos could also observe the civilization of certain Caniba states grow increasingly Yucayanized and align to “civilized” standards. Could the Sweetness of an entire population be increasing?

The most reasoned answer seemed to be that when Bacocolon personally granted the ingredients of civilization to the peoples – agriculture, calendar, monarchy, and so on – the Caniba were excluded. Despite having a capacity for Sweetness, the Caniba could not benefit from this "head start" and had to develop their own idiosyncratic civilization, and so the development of their Sweetness could only lag behind.



Predictability and Unpredictability. Fundamental to the Taiguano conception of the world was a division between order and chaos. The epitome of order was the instinct of animals and the movement of the tides and the celestial bodies. Order meant lack of change. The antithesis of order was chaos, represented by the degenerative change of wildfires and natural disasters.

The Taiguanos believed that previous to the descent of Bacocolon, the world was composed entirely of two forces, those of un-change and destructive change. There was no place for generative change in such a world, and eventually, left to its own devices, the world would have been destroyed, for nothing was being created, only maintained and destroyed. Then came Bacocolon. He gifted humans the capacity to undertake generative change, taught them how to achieve that, and tamed many of the destructive forces of nature to aid in creation – the storm becoming the rain, the wildfire becoming the kitchen fire. Humans were thus tasked with maintaining and expanding the world, by creating when things were being destroyed. They were the wardens of the universe.


Taiguan. When the Sweetness of many people came together for a common purpose, it was called taiguan. Any human relationship was taiguan, as were the greater projects of art and architecture. As mentioned, the Taiguanos believed that Sweetness survived a human’s death in taiguan, which became a form of paradisiac immortality for a person’s zemi. However, the Taiguanos also distinguished between taiguan used for evil ends, the so-called Hot Taiguan, and that used for good, the Cool Taiguan.

The Taiguanos upheld the value of a White, “self-conscious” Taiguan, when taiguan acts were carried out for their own sake: love for the sake of love, art for the sake of art, scholarship for the sake of scholarship. The Taiguanos considered this the most elevated form of human achievement and one that could be attained only through education in the faith.

The Taiguanos recognized that many other peoples possessed civilizations of their own. What was the position of their taiguan? The Taiguanos generally considered their fellow Yucayans’ and the Yuzibacaneiris’ civilization as advanced taiguan, lacking only in Whiteness. Missionaries were often sent to Cuba, the Maya world, and Central America to convert them to the Taiguano faith, generally to no avail. The Caniba, however, had cultures clearly inferior to the Taiguanos’. The fifteenth-century Taiguano state thus believed that they had a moral obligation to “civilize” the barbarians, an obligation manifested in two different ways: slave raiding to procure slaves to be civilized, and the dispatch of scholars and elites to Caniba realms to instruct them in taiguan.

Sweetness required cultural support to flourish. Taiguan fed Sweetness just as Sweetness enabled taiguan. Bacocolon thus personally taught Yucayans and Mesoamericans the elements of civilization, providing them with a ready-made taiguan that could foster their Sweetness. (The Caniba were excluded, as mentioned above.) At varying intervals in the history of each nation, Bacocolon also sent down Prophets and Prophetesses to enhance the state of the nation’s taiguan, whether by teaching new arts and sciences or illustrating the way to attain the self-conscious state of White Sweetness. The Taiguano Prophetess was the latest example, though some also said Cemānāhuatēpēhuani was a misunderstood Prophet.

The purpose of society was thought to be to steer all its members’ Sweetness toward the needs of Cool and White Taiguan. The issue, then, was that of social hierarchies. The fifteenth-century Taiguano faith remained the cult of the elite, and most of the population remained worshippers of Sweetness effigies. Furthermore, the highly complex Taiguano state required a subservient population of subsistence cultivators. The practical needs of the state militated against the egalitarian ideology of taiguan. What was to be the solution?

The most popular answer was that the greater needs of White Taiguan required that commoners be only gradually instructed in taiguan, as to continue the smooth operation of the state. State educational institutions catered to the children of particularly prosperous or successful commoners (usually merchants and village chieftains) and sometimes allowed them to join the court of the Guacayaraboque, or emperor, but the vast majority of the population remained ignorant of elite rituals and theology, and indeed, the community expected even Cocopan-educated village chieftains to serve the Sweetness effigies of the village. This reluctance towards popular proselytization was always somewhat controversial, and reform movements in the next century centered on a more populist interpretation of the faith.



Hot and Cool. The Taiguanos made a distinction between Sweetness and taiguan that produced lasting generative effects, the Cool, and those that ultimately led to degeneration, the Hot. The Cool Sweetness was associated with a state of being referred to as “conviviality,” associated with artistic creativity, appreciation for beauty, humor, humility, compassion, respect, generosity, friendship, love, trust, honesty, justice, and health. Conviviality itself was divided into four categories, a joyous, ebullient sort found in festivals, a quiet, peaceful sort found in everyday life, an indignant sort found when a member of the community has been wronged by a Hot act, and a sad sort found among the homesick, or those who have lost close kin.

All degenerative things were considered morally improper. The Hot emotions included selfishness, hatred, anger, belligerence, jealousy, greed, deceit, depressive sadness, and unhealthy lust and gluttony. Because these emotions sought degeneration by definition, all actions that came from them had to be degenerative. These Hot emotions were associated with immoderate variants of conviviality: anger could come from an excessive amount of alcoholic consumption in festivals, and depression was a natural extension of convivial grief.

The division between Hot and Cool emotions was believed to originate from Bacocolon. When he gave the capacity for Sweetness to humans, he could not purge their opia, their base animalistic mentality. It instead merged with the new substance of the Sweetness, becoming Hot Sweetness. Hot Sweetness was thus the conscious incarnation of the subconscious opia. There was a constant state of conflict between the Cool Sweetness that had come directly from Bacocolon and the Hot Sweetness-opia that only ended in death and the separation of opia and Sweetness.

Taiguano gentlemen were expected to always restrain their Hot emotions, and there were in fact mantra-like incantations and quasi-yogic exercises to help them control themselves. When Hot emotions toward other members of court became unbearable, however, ministers were encouraged to resign and withdraw to their countryside residences. The Guacayaraboque also removed particularly factitious members of court from government office. This proved for an unstable government, one particularly vulnerable to factionalism.

Hot Taiguan included warfare, which by necessity involved the destruction of human beings. Taiguano ideology theoretically permitted only defensive wars and wars fought to expand the reach of White Taiguan, whether by slave raiding or territorial conquest. Trade was another issue of controversy; archaeology suggests that the key supporters of the early Taiguano movement were merchant naboria, but trade was clearly a product of the Hot emotion of greed! The Taiguanos resolved the issue by banning internal trade between Bacocolon-worshipping Yucayans but allowing merchants to participate in state-conducted commerce with infidels. This was not a major change, for there had already been little internal trade under the war-torn conditions of the Age of Caciques and the naboria had made their fortune by trading with Mesoamerica.


Bacocolon. At the center of Taiguano religion was Bacocolon, the god of Sweetness. Taiguano intellectuals professed to know little for sure about the deity. They knew that he had granted Sweetness to humans, that every Sweetness in the world was a shard of his own infinite Sweetness. Indeed, the deity was really the concept of Sweetness personified. He was presumably incorporeal or composed of the same liquid essence that gave humans the capacity for Sweetness, though artistic depictions gave him human form.

Taiguano theologians believed that the world had always existed but been in progressive decline due to the lack of a generative force prior to Bacocolon’s creation of humans. The question, then, was whether Bacocolon himself had always existed, or if he had been spontaneously generated. The Taiguanos generally preferred the latter, but the method of his spontaneous generation was again unknown.​
 
There is no real analogue between Sweetness and the Abrahamic conception of the “soul.” The Taiguanos believed in a dual personhood, with the generative power of Sweetness opposed by a base, instinctive animal nature called the opia. The Sweetness was the seat of consciousness and emotion and the opia the seat of the subconscious, though the latter took conscious and even willful form as the evil Hot Sweetness. There was a constant state of conflict between the zemi and the opia. When a person died, the opia went to the underworld known as the Cave of Coabey and returned as bats, moths, and dangerous demons. But their Sweetness remained in the Sweetness of those they had influenced and in the taiguan they had contributed to – and, freed from the struggle with their opia, “the Sweetness is happy in the embrace of Bacocolon.”

The Islamic concept of nafs is pretty similar. Though the nafs is divided into stages of realization of God. The first stage an-nafs al-ammarah or the primitive nature of man. A man at this stage is dominates by his animalistic base desires. Unbridled Sexual Lust, Uncontrolled Anger, Greed and envy. All of those. The next stage of nafs is the one in which most of us are grouped. An-nafs al-lumawwah or the " self - accusing nafs ". This is when a person does something morally wrong his conscience will reprimand him for listening to his base ego. This is where a man will repent if he has done something wrong and strives for moral perfection. Yet this man is still wracked by materialism and he still struggles with his lesser nafs. The third stage of nafs is an-nafs al-mutma'innah. The nafs at peace. This is when a man becomes so complete in his faith that he does not care for worldly matters and materialism. He has let go of his base desires or at the very least they have very little power over him. He becomes at peace with his inner nature and is religiously observant.

Opia is the stage of an-nafs al-ammarah. Where the base desires are in control and conscience is thrown out the window. Sweetness however is more akin to positive emotions than the actual stages of the nafs. In the later stages of nafs emotion is not upheld as a trait of the enlightened rather it is their state of consciousness which is glorified. It is pretty interesting how sweetness parallels nafs and the way that the taiguano treat the Carib is pretty similar to how Malays treated the Orang Asli. They don't have sweetness therefore they must be enlightened through slavery to righteous masters who possess sweetness. The Malays thought of the Orang Asli as their inferiors. Too barbaric to embrace civilization and so slavery was justified as blessing in disguise to the Orang Asli, a way to civilized them. (nevermind that building a civilization in the middle of the jungles I pretty hard to do).
 
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Entry 28-1: OTL background for Taiguano theology
Entry 28 is a brief introduction to Taiguano ideology. It has two main historical inspirations: historical Aztec philosophy as reconstructed by James Maffie (Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion), and the humanistic worldview of the Muinane people of Colombia, who belong to the same Amazonian cultural world as the OTL Taino (“‘Though it comes as evil, I embrace it as good’: Social Sensibilities and the Transformation of Malignant Agency among the Muinane,” by Londono-Sulkin in the anthology The Anthropology of Love and Anger).

Maffie reconstructs Aztec philosophy as including a fundamental dichotomy between ordered change, as represented by the masculine and creative force of Quetzalcōhuātl, and the disordered energy of the deity Tezcatlipōca. To quote Maffie (Philosophy, pp. 167):

The inamic [dualistic; from Nahuatl īnamic “his partner; his spouse] “deity” pair Quetzalcoatl ~ Tezcatlipoca represents the creative ~ destructive and generative ~ degenerative forces whose continuing agon [struggle; from Greek agṓn “contest”] defines the becoming of reality. The Aztecs saw the becoming of the cosmos as the product of the ongoing inamic struggle between the generative, ordering forces of Quetzalcoatl, on the one hand, and the degenerative, disordering forces of Tezcatlipoca, on the other. Quetzalcoatl represents the forces of generation, creation, being, ordering, arrangement, and hence creative transformation. Tezcatlipoca represents the forces of degeneration, destruction, nonbeing, disorder, derangement, and hence destructive transformation. Tezcatlipoca represents forces that at any moment erupt in our lives, subverting being and order and so sabotaging our endeavors​

The Taiguanos have adopted Quetzalcōhuātl and his generative force as a focus of worship, but not the īnamic deity Tezcatlipōca and his disorderly energy.

The association between Bacocolon and rain and wind also comes from Mesoamerican belief, both ITTL and IOTL. Ehēcatl, the god of wind, was one of the most important aspects of Quetzalcōhuātl. The Florentine Codex states:

[Quetzalcōhuātl] was the wind, the guide and road-sweeper of the rain gods, of the masters of the water, of those who brought rain. And when the wind rose, when the dust rumbled, and it crackled and there was a great din, and it became dark and the wind blew in many directions, and it thundered; then it was said: “Quetzalcoatl is wrathful.”
The Muinane of Colombia, a people so obscure that no Wikipedia article exists for the people, have a cosmology whose anthropocentrism is also reminiscent of the Taiguanos, with the real-life Muinane “Speech of Tobacco” a key inspiration for my fictional Taiguano Sweetness (Anthropology, pp. 174-175):

The Muinane’s cosmological narratives depict an agent-filled cosmos where animals, birds, fish, trees, and other beings of the jungles, rivers, and various layers of the universe lead social lives in certain ways similar to those of Real People (i.e. humans, basically the Muinane), but which are fundamentally flawed in ways prototypical of the undesirable. The ritual substances of animals… are but imperfect or perverse caricatures of the ideal human forms, when not absolute deviations from them. As the myths describe and explain, at the time of creation, the creator god made several attempts to fabricate human beings. The results of one such attempt were animals, who were initially shaped like Real People. The creator gave them his “Speech of Tobacco” (simultaneously a substance, an animating breath and the capacity for speech). This tobacco was to provide them with awareness, and motivate and empower them to behave in the manner the deity proscribed. The myths reiterate often that animals behaved immorally, misusing the tobacco and disobeying the prescriptions of the Speech. They did not behave with the love, respect, humility, persistence, discipline and productivity which the creator had attempted to instil [sic] in them, and so they ruined the tobacco that endowed such virtues. Infuriated by the disobedient transgressions of his creations, the deity transformed them into animals, and their tobacco into spurious versions of tobacco. He rebuked them, and told them that thenceforth they would be “fruit” to be eaten by Real People, the sole creation which used his Speech of tobacco correctly…

Animals claim to be or else to possess true tobacco, or true fire, or true axes, which are all material things which constitute moral human agency, and which in fact animals lack. For example, the teeth of an agouti [rodent species] are its “axe,” yet this axe does not enable it to fell the forest and plant a garden, in a proper moral way. The hair of a red deer is its fire, yet this false fire cannot cook food to remove its pathogens and disgusting flavours, nor burn up the slashed food so that people can plant seeds in their fertile ashes. The jaguar’s tobacco is strong and enables it to hunt, but does not allow it to distinguish between its prey and its kin, and so the jaguar cannot live in a properly sociable manner.​

While we can’t really know for sure what the OTL Taino value system was, they were part of the same very general cultural sphere as the Muinane, so I took some artistic liberties. The distinction between a positive Coolness and a negative Hotness also come from the Muinane.

On a final note, I wanted the Taiguano “religion,” if you can call it that (I envisioned its role as more like Confucianism), to appeal to me on a personal level. So there are a fair few touches from that too.
 
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