Pre-Columbian Taino Pipe For Inhalation of The Hallucinogen Cohoba.
[TAINO ARTISAN]
Dominican Republic, 12th-15th Century. 97mm x 52mm, carved manatee bone. Provenance: from the collection of Mr. Henri Vernes, Jacques Kerchache- Art Taino Musee Du Petit Palais. 1100-1500 AD
A delicate carving in excellent condition. Rare. An inhaler used to take the powdered hallucinogen called Cohoba thought by the eminent ethnobotanist Safford to be a product of the seeds of the plant Piptadenia peregrina. The whole is carved in a bold style and is anthropomorphically shaped as a figure with arms upraised and hands clasping two vessels which form the two nostril holes.
The active ingredient of Cohoba is thought to be N,N-DMT, 5-MeO-DMT, and Bufotenin (the latter as in the skin secretions of the eponymous toad). The navigator Christopher Columbus commissioned Friar Ramon Pane to investigate Cohoba shamanic practices on Hispaniola for his second voyage. Friar Pane recorded that with the Cohoba powder they ..lose consciousness and become like drunken men.. and described a 'cane that has two branches to sniff the dust. (Wassen p235 in -Ethnopharmacologic Search For Psychoactive Drugs. Proceedings of a sSymposium Held in San Francisco, California, January 28-30, 1967.)
The Friar went on to describe the divinatory and medical-ceremonial uses of the snuffed dust recording how it was ingested as a purgative by the Bohuti or shaman to divine from the spirits and gods what caused the sickness. The drug was also used to prophesy the outcome of battles and Pane records that its effect on perception was to invert reality:
Consider what a state their brains are in, because they say the cabins seemed to them to be turned upside down and that men are walking with their feet in the air. (p238 ibid).
In the same paper Wassen suggests that bone was rarely used by the Island Tainos and that wood was a staple of their material culture. This thesis is contradicted by Kerchache`s fine collection of bone vomiting spoons, tubes and other ritual objects. The manatee, often mistaken for a mermaid, was once abundant in Caribbean waters suggesting that certain materials were reserved for higher status individuals or important tribal rituals in pre-Columbian Taino culture and were not necessarily trade goods. From the collection of Henri Vernes aka Bob Moranes adventurer, writer and spy.
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