The Taíno origin narratives of caves and emergence

Record summary

Early colonial accounts, especially Ramón Pané’s report, describe Taíno origin traditions in which ancestral people emerge from caves or subterranean places, including the famous Cacibajagua episode. These narratives are relevant to comparison because caves function as thresholds between ancestral, human, and sacred domains rather than merely as “hells.” The evidence is fragmentary and filtered through a missionary interpreter writing for European readers. Names, sequence, and meanings vary across retellings, and later Caribbean folklore should not automatically be treated as direct survival of the recorded Taíno material.