Zemi (Taino Effigy)
The zemi is the carved effigy through which the Taíno of the Greater Antilles kept their spirits close: figures of wood, stone, bone or cotton, shaped by carvers to hold a spirit and kept in the household, in the fields, or in the house of the cacique. The behique, the ritual specialist, consulted them for health, harvests and answers, and Spanish accounts describe caciques who owned great numbers of them, receiving the first fruits and offering cures before them. Some zemis were consulted in the cohoba ceremony, when the behique inhaled the powder of the sacred seeds and spoke the spirit's wo