A History of the World in 100 Objects

by MacGregor, Neil

  The term ‘Taino’ is generally used to describe the dominant group of people that inhabited the larger Caribbean islands: Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico and Hispaniola (now divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic), where our stool was found. Across the islands ritual artefacts have been found that give us some idea of Taino life and thought. There are face-like masks, for example, designed to be worn on the body, wooden statuettes and inhalers for sniffing a mind-altering substance. The most evocative of all these surviving traces of the Taino are the carved ceremonial stools known as duhos. They are the physical expression of a distinctive Taino world view.

  The Taino people believed that they lived in parallel with an invisible world of ancestors and gods, from whom their leaders could seek knowledge of the future. A duho would be owned only by the most important members of a community, and it was the vital means of access to the realm of the spirits. It was in one sense a throne, but it was also a portal and a vehicle to the supernatural world.

  It is about the size of a foot stool – a small curved seat carved out of rich dark wood, highly polished and gleaming. Carved at the front is a grimacing, goggle-eyed creature that looks almost human, with an enormous mouth, wide ears and two arms planted on the ground, which form the front two legs of the stool. From there a broad curve of wood sweeps upwards, like a wide beaver tail, supported at the back by two more legs. This creature looks like nothing on Earth – but one thing is certain: it’s male. Underneath this strange composite being and between the hind legs are carved male genitals.

  The grimacing face of the stool’s half-human, half-animal creature

  This is a seat for a leader – for the chief of a village or a region. Taino leaders could be either male or female, and the duho embodied their social, political and religious power; it was crucial to their function in society. In at least one instance a leader was buried sitting on his duho. Dr José Oliver, an archaeologist who has been doing new work on the Taino, explains how duhos would have been used:

  The duho is not a piece of furniture but rather a symbolic location of where the chief would stand. This particular object is too small for a human being to sit on it. What is interesting is that all the wooden seats that we know of in the Caribbean, including this one, tend to be male or they are marked with the male gender, and sometimes show the male genitalia under the seat. That’s because this seat is actually an anthropomorphic personage. Think of it as a human being on four legs and what you sit on is the back of this personage. You sit on top almost like you are sitting over a donkey or a horse. So the chief is mounting this object, which happens to also be a sentient being. They thought of these things as having a cemi, that is, a soul.

  So the gaping, boggle-eyed figure at the front of our seat, humanoid but not human, is the link to the cemi, to the spirit or the ancestor.

  One of the chief’s key roles was to access the domain of the sacred, the realm of the cemis. Seated, or perched, on the duho, he sniffed a hallucinogenic snuff made from the charred seeds of the cohoba tree. It begins to work within half an hour, and the resulting effects last for two to three hours, creating colourful patterns, strange sounds and voices, leading to full dream-like hallucinations.

  One of the early Spanish recorders of the Taino culture, and probably the most sympathetic, was Bartolomé de las Casas. He arrived on Hispaniola in 1502 and described the rituals in which the duho had its role – he calls the chief a Lord:

  They had the custom of convening meetings to determine arduous things, such as mobilizing for war and other things that they thought important for performing their cohoba ceremony. The first to start was the Lord, and while he was doing it the rest remained quiet and were absorbed while seated on low and well-carved benches they call duhos. Having done his cohoba (which is inhaling through the nostrils those powders), he remained for a while with his head turned sideward and with his arms resting on his knees. He would give them an account of his vision, telling them that the cemi spoke to him and certified the good or adverse times to come, or that they would have children or that they would die, or that they would have conflict or war with their neighbours.

  The Taino world was run by chiefdoms – centres of power whose leaders fought, negotiated and allied among themselves. They generally lived in settlements of a few thousand people, in large circular houses, each accommodating perhaps a dozen families, clustered around a central square. The chief’s house, which would also double as the local sacred space or temple where the duho was put to work, would stand some distance away.

  We don’t know who would have made these duhos, but certainly the materials were very deliberately chosen. The wood of the duho is native to the Caribbean, and it fascinated the Europeans who encountered it. They called it lignum vitae – the ‘wood of life’ – because of its remarkable qualities. Its resin was used to treat a wide range of ailments, from sore throats to syphilis. It is also one of the few woods so dense that it sinks in water. One Spaniard wrote admiringly of the duhos: ‘they are made of such beautiful, smooth and perfect wood, that nothing else more beautiful was ever made of gold or silver.’

  Actually, there is gold on our duho as well. The wide gaping mouth and the straining, boggling eyes of the humanoid head at the front are emphasized by being inlaid with gold discs, adding enormously to the frightening power of the object. It was gold like this that made the Spaniards believe that they might find in Hispaniola the treasure they had been hoping for. They were disappointed: gold in the Dominican Republic is found only in the rivers, in small quantities accumulated over many generations. Like the special wood, this rare, precious gold marked out the duho as an exceptional object, something able to mediate between the earthly and the supernatural worlds.

  It could also mediate between living leaders. Important visitors would be ceremonially seated on duhos, and Christopher Columbus himself received this honour. But of all the futures that could have been foretold by the Taino chiefs sitting on their duhos, nothing could have matched what actually happened. The Spaniards brought with them smallpox and typhoid – and even the common cold was catastrophic to the Taino communities, who had no immunity. Those who survived were resettled by the Spanish, so kinship groups were torn apart, and then African slaves were brought in to replace the vanishing local labour force.

  How much of the Taino inheritance, or identity, survived? In the Caribbean today this is the subject of much contentious public debate. Professor Gabriel Haslip-Viera, author of Taino Revival, considers the claims of those who say they are of Taino descent:

  The Taino people as a pure ethnic group essentially came to an end by 1600, about a hundred years after the arrival of the Spaniards. The small number of survivors essentially mixed in with the Spanish colonists and the Africans that were brought into the Caribbean to replace them as the main labour force. Because primarily the mixture in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean is an African/European mix, that’s what has been coming out in the recent studies, the so-called admixture tests that geneticists have been doing in recent years. Those tests have demonstrated overwhelmingly that the peoples of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, of the Greater Antilles, are people of mixed background and that the mixture is primarily European and African.

  The Taino may have been virtually wiped out hundreds of years ago, but we still have echoes of the lost Taino world in a few words familiar to us, words which reflect Taino experience and culture: hurricane, barbecue, hammock, canoe and tobacco. These are, in the Caribbean context, everyday things, but the physical survivals of the Taino world, like the duho stool, speak of the universal human need to connect with what is beyond the local, with the world of spirits and gods. This constant human need provides the unifying theme for my next choice of objects.

  PART FOURTEEN

  Meeting the Gods

  AD 1200–1500

  Across the world different religious systems used objects to bridge the gap between the human and the divine, to aid the dialogue between individuals,
communities or even empires and their gods. In the western Christian Church, pilgrims flocked to shrines to see holy relics, including the body parts of saints. In the eastern Orthodox Christian Church, images of Jesus and the saints were venerated in the form of icons. Hindu worshippers in India used temple statues to develop personal relationships with individual Hindu gods. In Huastec Mexico, penitents visited statues of the mother goddess asking for cleansing and forgiveness. In the Pacific, the religion of the Easter Islanders evolved to reflect their deteriorating environment: they stopped venerating statues of their ancestors and instead created a cult centred on the island’s diminishing bird population.

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  Holy Thorn Reliquary

  Reliquary made of gold, jewels and enamel, from Paris, France

  AD 1350–1400

  Around 600 years ago religion and society all round the world were so closely connected that it would have been impossible for most people to say where one ended and the other began. Perhaps that’s why unworldly hopes were so often articulated through worldly wealth – in temples and precious objects. It is a paradox that we see in extreme form in the Holy Thorn Reliquary. The reliquary was built to showcase what was believed to be one of the thorns from the Crown of Thorns placed on Christ’s head before the crucifixion – a relic of the utmost sanctity.

  The crown itself is now held in the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris, but was originally housed in the Sainte-Chapelle, the palace church of the kings of France built in the 1240s to hold what were then the most precious objects in Europe – supreme among them, without question, the Crown of Thorns. For medieval Christendom the central purpose of life in this world was to secure salvation in the next. Relics of the saints offered a direct line to heaven, and no relics were more powerful, or more valuable, than those associated with the suffering of Christ himself. The amazing church of the Sainte-Chapelle, created to exhibit the king’s collection of relics, cost 40,000 livres to build; the Crown of Thorns alone cost the king over three times that amount. It was probably the most valuable thing in Europe. The most precious gift that the king of France could make was a single thorn detached from the crown.

  One of those detached thorns is the centrepiece of the Holy Thorn Reliquary, a 20-centimetre (8-inch) high theatre made of solid gold and encrusted with jewels. In it we watch the terrifying drama of the end of the world, the day on which we, along with all the other dead, will be raised and will face judgement. This is a drama in which one day every spectator will be a participant. It is in three acts. At the bottom, as angels blow their trumpets at the Earth’s imagined corners, graves open on an enamel hillside of vivid green. Four figures – two men, two women, naked in white enamel and still in their coffins – look up and raise their hands in supplication. Far above them, at the very top of the reliquary, is God the Father sitting in judgement, among radiant gold and precious gems. In between is the focus of the whole reliquary.

  For medieval Christians the only hope of escaping the torments of hell lay in the redeeming blood that Christ had shed. So, at the very centre of the reliquary is Christ, showing us his wounds, and just below him is one of the long, needle-like thorns that caused that holy blood to flow. Ista est una spinea corone Domini nostri Ihesu Christi, reads the enamel label: ‘This is a thorn from the crown of our lord Jesus Christ’.

  The Roman Catholic Bishop of Leeds, the Right Reverend Arthur Roche, emphasizes its significance:

  It certainly becomes a focus for the reflection on deeper things as to the cost of suffering. Especially when you think that if that thorn is authentic, then it was actually piercing the head of Christ during the course of his suffering and his crucifixion, and in some sense connects our suffering on this earth to his suffering for us; the focus gives us a strength to endure the things that we are presently going through.

  It is impossible to exaggerate how powerfully this object would affect any believer kneeling in front of it. The blood drawn by this worthless thorn will save immortal souls, and so nothing earthly can be too precious for it, neither the sapphire it stands on, nor the rock crystal that protects it, nor the rubies and the pearls that frame it. This is a sermon in gold and jewels, an aid to intense contemplation and a source of the deepest comfort.

  There is no way now of proving that this was a thorn that actually pierced the head of Christ, but we can say with confidence that it is a type of buckthorn that still grows around Jerusalem. The first mention of the Crown of Thorns as a relic is in Jerusalem around 400. It was later taken from the Holy Land to Constantinople, the Christian capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, where it was kept and venerated for centuries. But shortly after 1200 the impecunious emperor pawned the crown to the Venetians for a mammoth sum. This shocked his cousin, the crusader king of France, Louis IX, but it also gave him an opportunity. He paid off the emperor’s debt and redeemed the relic. So, although Louis as a crusader failed to conquer the Holy Land, the site of Christ’s suffering, he did acquire the Crown of Thorns. So great was its power in medieval people’s eyes that through it Louis was linked directly to Christ himself. To house his incomparable relic Louis built not just a reliquary, but a whole church. He called it his Holy Chapel – the Sainte-Chapelle.

  The stained-glass windows of the Sainte-Chapelle leave us in no doubt that Paris and the kingdom of France are to be permanently transformed by the arrival of the Crown of Thorns. Louis, who became St Louis when canonized in 1297, is shown paired with Solomon; the Sainte-Chapelle is his temple and Paris has become Jerusalem. When the crown arrived, it was described as being on deposit with the king of France until the Day of Judgement, when Christ would return to collect it and the kingdom of France would become the kingdom of Heaven. When this chapel was completed and dedicated in 1248, the archbishop proclaimed: ‘Just as the Lord Jesus Christ chose the Holy Land for the display of the mysteries of his redemption, so he has specially chosen our France for the more devoted veneration of the triumph of his Passion.’ The Crown of Thorns has played a long and fascinating part in the international politics of piety – it allowed St Louis to claim for France a unique status among the kingdoms of Europe, and every French ruler since St Louis has wanted to follow his example.

  The historian Sister Benedicta Ward sees this as something more than a religious quest:

  To have a relic particularly connected with the passion of Christ was the best thing you could have. But there were also relics of the saints, particularly the martyrs. I think they provoked a lot of envy, especially the French collections. The rivalry in England was intense: ‘We want to have a better relic than they have because we are a better nation than they are.’ They are subject to all kinds of external influences. Like everything else it can be part of commerce. Politics, commerce, exchange – this is certainly all round the relics.

  In the complex economy of political influence, a thorn from the crown became the ultimate French royal gift. In the late fourteenth century one came into the possession of a powerful French prince, Jean, duc de Berry, and we can be absolutely confident that the reliquary in the British Museum belonged to him. It has his coat of arms enamelled on to it, and it also sums up many of his preoccupations: he commissioned some of the greatest religious art of the period and he was a passionate collector of relics. He had what were claimed to be the marriage ring of the Virgin, a cup used at the wedding at Cana, a fragment of the Burning Bush and a complete body of one of the holy innocents, the children murdered by Herod. He was also an enthusiastic builder of castles, and so, appropriately, the base of our reliquary is a castle made out of solid gold. This Holy Thorn Reliquary is certainly one of the supreme achievements of medieval European metalwork, but sadly there is no way of knowing if it was the greatest artefact in Jean de Berry’s collection. The bulk of his goldsmiths’ work was broken up and melted down within months of his death, when the English occupied Paris after the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. The survival of this reliquary means that he must have given it away before he died.


  We are not sure who he gave it to, but by 1544 it was in the treasury of the Habsburg emperors in Vienna, and from there its secularization begins – the gold, enamel and jewels becoming far more valuable and interesting than the humble thorn that they house. In the 1860s it was sent for restoration to a dishonest antique dealer, who, instead of carrying out the repairs, created a forgery which he sent back in its place to the imperial treasury, keeping the original himself. Eventually the genuine reliquary was bought by the head of the Vienna branch of the Rothschild bank, and donated to the British Museum by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild in 1898 as part of the Waddesdon Bequest, which now occupies the whole of a small gallery at the Museum.

  You could almost say the Holy Thorn Reliquary is itself a single-object museum, if an incomparably lavish one – one exhibit mounted on sapphire, displayed behind rock crystal and labelled on enamel. But its purpose is the same as that of any museum: to provide a worthy setting for a great thing. We can’t know exactly how visitors approach objects on display in the British Museum, but many still use the Holy Thorn Reliquary for its original devotional purpose of contemplation and prayer.

  Solomon and the Queen of Sheba in the central diamond of a window in the Sainte-Chapelle

  The veneration of the Crown of Thorns itself remains very much alive. Napoleon decided that it should be housed permanently in Notre-Dame, and there, on the first Friday of every month, the whole Crown of Thorns, from which our one thorn was taken more than 600 years ago, is still shown to crowds of faithful worshippers.