Ramon Pané’s account of Caribbean Indigenous cosmology and flying beings

Record summary

Ramon Pané’s account of Taíno religious traditions, written in the 1490s, is one of the earliest European records of Indigenous Caribbean cosmology. It includes transformations, spirits, and mythic beings that can be compared with later winged-creature traditions, but it is explicitly a religious and ethnographic text rather than a zoological encounter report. The lead matters for tracing how early colonial writers translated non-European supernatural categories. The surviving text is mediated through Spanish transmission and later summaries, so names, forms, and contexts require careful philological verification.