A Couple of Zemis from Cuba

Zemis are kinds of religious paraphenalia used by the Arawak Indians. In Africa I suppose they would be called Fetishes. These examples are from the Tainos of Cuba.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zemi

In this case I found images of two of them that look to be representations of Unknown animals.

The one below is a vomit stick to put down a persons throat and make them vomit, for purification rituals. In this cae it looks to me like the big fishing bat that is the American Ahool, also represented in sculptures of Northern South America and in Mesoamerica as Kamazotz (Camazotz)

This would represent the bat with the wings spread (center) and also seated on the ground with the wings folded. The creature is supposed to be the size of a baby or a small child. The wingspan is as big as the wingspan of a large eagle or even bigger than that, 10-12 feet across or so.

 (I added the line between the legs for clarity as well as taking it apart to show the wings better)

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Below is a kind of a sea monster:

And I am just wondering if this is not another portrayal of the Caribbean Elephant seal. The creature is called "Water Horse" in nearby Central America and there are sightings of sea monsters near to Cuba that are probably actually Elephant seals, and some that possibly came ashore at Cuba (Particularly in the 1940s) It is not an alligator and it has mammalian teeth (not Reptillian) with distinctive canines at the corners of its jaws. It is also not a whale because of those teeth.

'Little Gold Sea Monster' No Longer Alone

At one poit at the CFZ blog I showed my redrawing of a photograph from the book South American Indian Mythology (Larousse) from my local library: I redrew it because I could find no comparable photographs of the artifact anyplace else. The object was one of a pair cast in gold, said to represent the "Sea-serpent" ancestors of the local Indians at Lake Maricaibo, Venezuela (which is not a lake but is a very large bay.) At the time I published this at the CFZ originally, I had already identified this with the Huilla of those parts (because of its vertical undulation and three-toed track) and identified it as one of the "Water Horses" of the coastal regions of South America. I identified the creatures as the source of the Elephant seals reported by Roy Mackal to visit Florida and White River in Arkansas (leaving suppoedly three-toed tracks as incomplete prints of its flippers) and stated by him to come from the coasts of Costa Rica and Nicaragua. (In Search of Hidden Animals, 1981)

Huilla
Freshwater Monsterof the West Indies.
Etymology: Huilla is a common name for the
Anaconda (Eunectes murinus) in South America.
Physical  description:  Serpentine.  Length,
25–50 feet. gray or green. Scaly. Horselike head.
Behavior: Amphibious. Swims swiftly by flex-
ing  its  body  into  arches.  Migrates  from  one
body of water to another. Emits a high-pitched
whistle.
Tracks: Three-toed.
Distribution: Ortoire River, Trinidad.
Sources: Edward L. Joseph, History of
Trinidad (London: A. K. Newman, 1838);
John O. Brathwaite (letter), Strange Magazine,
no. 18 (Summer 1997): 2.

Wihwin
SEA MONSTER of the coast of Central America.
Etymology: Mískito (Misumalpan) word.
Physical description: Horselike. Sharp teeth.
Behavior: Goes ashore in the summer.
Distribution: Atlantic coast of Nicaragua and
Honduras.
Source: Hubert Howe Bancroft, The Native
Races of the Pacific States of North America
(New York: D. Appleton, 1875), vol. 3.
[Three-toed tracks also reported in the region]

The original Little Gold Sea Monsters of Caribbean South America

As redrawn by Dale D as accurately as possible

Now while on a photo search I find this very odd artifact from Texas found while a dam project threatened an archaeological site with flooding, and it is obviously some sort of large blunt-nosed seal looking like a walrus or an Elephant seal (the latter more likely because it has no tusks). The only "Known" seal from the area was the Caribbean monk seal, which is much the same bodily conformation as the common seal and looks nothing like this:nor yet are there supposed to be any sea lions or fur seals in the area. This object was found in a child's collection of odd stones and bric-a-brac, presumably dating to the 1700s in a Spanish plantation known to have existed in the area at one time, but there were older Indian artifacts found in the area and among the child's collection. So there is no direct dating but it scarcely matters-there were supposed to be no large seals in Texas at the time or for any postglacial phase before that, nor yet any way of explaining how the people there ever came to know of such things as large seals that looked like this.

More recently there have been photographs which resembled elephant seals in the Caribbean, and in White River, Arkansas (the latter according to Mackal)