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Lot 46
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Taino Manatee Bone Cohoba Spatula with Ithyphallic Zemi
Taino Manatee Bone Cohoba Spatula with Ithyphallic Zemi
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Pre-Columbian, Caribbean, Dominican Republic, Taino, ca. 1000–1500 CE. A slender, hand-carved implement of manatee bone, its smooth tapering blade rising into a finely worked figural handle. The terminal is dominated by a crouching anthropomorphic zemi: large round eyes set within incised facial planes, a banded headdress or coiffure crowning the brow, and short arms folded inward to flank an openworked torso pierced with rectangular voids. Between the drawn-up knees projects an erect phallus, a frank emblem of generative power. Parallel hatching defines the limbs and ribs, while the lower body resolves into the long, polished spatulate blade, worn glassy from use.

Objects of this kind served the cohoba ceremony, the central rite by which Taino caciques and behiques communed with the spirit world. After ingesting a hallucinogenic snuff prepared from the seeds of Anadenanthera peregrina, the celebrant induced ritual vomiting with a slender spatula introduced into the throat, purifying the body before receiving visions. The figural handle is no mere ornament: it embodies a zemi, an ancestral or divine spirit whose presence sanctified the rite and lent its potency to the practitioner's hand. The exposed phallus locates that potency in the realm of fertility and ancestral continuity, themes never far from Taino ritual imagery.

Manatee bone, dense and ivory-pale, was prized across the Greater Antilles for objects of high status and ritual consequence. The animal itself carried mythic weight in Taino cosmology, and the labor of working its compact tissue with stone and shell tools marks this piece as the product of specialist craft. The figure's posture, knees drawn up and arms tucked, recalls the seated dujo-bound zemis depicted on stone and wooden ceremonial seats, suggesting that the spirit here is shown in the very attitude of cohoba reception. Mounted on a custom display stand. Size: 1.5" W x 8.8" H (3.8 cm W x 22.4 cm H); on included custom stand: 10.4" H (26.4 cm H).

Provenance: ex-private collection, Fairhaven, Massachusetts, USA, collected from 2010 to 2015

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Item # 198698

  • Condition: Good. Professionally repaired with some chipping and infill along visible break lines.

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by Artemis Fine Arts
June 25, 2026 9:00 AM MDT
686 S. Taylor Avenue
Suite 108
Louisville, CO, US 80027

Artemis Fine Arts

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