Demon Landscapes and Cartographic Exorcism in Guayana

Neil L Whitehead

Map of Guayana and its Demons, 1599, Hondius (in Theodor de Bry, Americae III

Maps are a form of power but, despite the way in which they may accurately represent spatial relationships and the presence of material earth forms, many of those maps are not meant as guides to anything.

A world map is like this – it demonstrates to the producers and consumers a power to envision the world but no one could travel the world using such a map.

So too, even with much m ore localized and small scale maps, until the advent of mass travel in the 19th century, maps are more expressive of how territory landscape and space are valorized rather than being practical tools for navigation.

Certainly the very first “practical maps” in western cartography – such as the Greek sailing rutters – are from the 1st- 3rd centuries AD and even they encode ethnological judgments. However, they are not visual representations of places but rather verbal iterations of routes between places. 2

Historical cartographers see such texts as ancestral to our own cultural forms of mapping and this indicates the priority of ideas of accurate representation in the ideology of western map-making.

The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea – visualized by Abram Ortelio, 1597

This is nicely illustrated by Ortelio’s 16th century rendering of the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a renowned 1st century AD rutter, which therefore culturally announces this emphasis on the accurate visual depiction of material space in western map-making

Papyri from the Book of the Dead of Nakht

On the other hand. ancient Egyptian maps for the passage to the underworld, earlier than the Greek sailing rutters, could have been a staring point for modern maps especially since they are representational of spatial relationships.

But they are not maps in the sense that contemporary historical cartography understands its own origins and the history of mapping because they do not show material, earthly places.

However, such ritual routes across sacred and immaterial space was also the essence of Amazonian indigenous mapping. The routes of ancestors and culture heroes across the night sky, beneath the waters and through mountains are verbally iterated in shamanic chants.

Such routes of knowledge do have material landscape referents and therefore could also function like the Greek sailing rutters to be practical guides across material landscapes.

If then our own histories of the map are bifurcated into he actual and the imaginary, or mundane and visionary this strongly signals the recent colonial purposes of mapping and how ideologies of science, measurement and remote sensing have played into that.

In short colonial purposes were to exorcise the demons of native spiritual cartography from the spaces of national occupation and to provide a re-enchantment of the emergent national space with forms of western “magical” understanding – distances, elevations topographies, climactic zones, roads, settlements, fortification and so on.

Maps thus create a virtual world, akin to the digitally based virtual worlds of the on-line world, but do so in an analogical fashion. Lines, dots, shapes, colors spaces stand for and represent an imagined world but do so by making a claim to accurate representation.

This entails that the wider cultural work of such maps is occluded by the claim to accuracy and precision. But this did not occur all at once and of course it is in fact not possible to separate representation from its other cultural meanings.

Thus the history of colonial mapping may be understood in part through the ways in which these two distinct aspects of mapping, the visionary and the mundane, vied for visual dominance in the actual making of maps.

In order to draw out these features of colonial mapping that finally permitted “seeing the nation” that was otherwise uncertain and invisible in the vastness of unmarked space of the wild and untamed jungle my talk explores the human terrain of Guayana.

Firstly as constituted through indigenous mappings of physical and spiritual space and latterly how that indigenous vision was exorcised of its demonic and threatening genius locii through the inscription of colonial and national territorial desires.

Roman representation of the genius loci

Fresco in Pompeii, ca. 60-79 A.D

Snakes and Dragons are also important guardian spirits “esak” of gold bearing deposits and ritual spaces in indigenous mythologies

The notion of the genius loci derives from Roman mythology. A genius loci was the protective spirit of a place, often depicted as a snake and in contemporary usage refers to a location's distinctive atmosphere, or a "spirit of place", rather than necessarily a guardian spirit.

However, in the case of colonial mapping in particular the possible exorcism of such genius loci was manifestly a part of the purpose of “accurate representation” and as such an act of possession. By dis-enchanting the indigenous landscape and inscribing new meanings into places maps were a token of mastery and control.

Paradoxically what constituted such “places” or sites for the acts of cartographic disenchantment were wholly defined by the indigenous culture so that the project of colony and nation was anchored by very these points of cultural contention.

But one other important general distinction need so to be made. Just as the Egyptian Royal papyri maps of the underworld were only available to a limited audience, so too the output of western cartographers, until the 19th century, had a very restricted and privileged clientele.

By contrast the Greek rutters were known to and used by ordinary sailors and traders. So too in South America, initial maps were all like the rutters, giving limited but very practical navigational information for costing the Atlantic littoral or entering the mouths of the major rivers.

Provincia de los Aruacas, ca. 1540

Only with time would maps summating such dispersed knowledge be attempted and it is those maps which do the cultural work of “seeing the nation”, particularly as the audience itself becomes diverse in social origins This is very striking in European maps, even from the 12th century

Opicinus de Canistris, World map, 1296 - 1300

But this visual torpe greatly increased as Europe and its “nations” were themselves defined partly through the experience of the colonization of the Americas

Sebastian Munster, Europe as a Queen, Basel 1570

It is therefore most notable that Jodocus Hondius who produced the enduring map of the demonic landscape of Guayana also produced a striking vision of the Belgian nation

Jodocus Hondius the Elder, Leo Belgicus, 1611

This kind of anthropomorphic map became a key way of seeing the nation in 19th century and into the 20th century.

Emrik & Binger, New map of Europe, Haarlem 1870

And in places as diverse as Finland and Brazil

1948

“Seeing the nation” in Finland and Sao Paulo, early 20th century

1932

Paralleling processes of landscape representation through maps anthropologists, cosmographers, naturalists and other scientists also elaborated more intimate delineations of cultures, languages, artifacts and bodies.

Ethnographic Chart of the World Shewing (sic) the Distribution and Varieties of the Human Race – from General Atlas Of The World: … Black, Hall and Hughes, 1854; Edinburgh 9

As a consequence of such attempts to stabilize the colonial and national imaginary through geography and other sciences a range of superstitious or fanciful places and beings were cleansed from the cartographic and cultural scene.

As Bruno Latour first suggested, the logic of modern science is one of purification, the sorting of the unmarked into categories, typologies and classes. But this process can never really capture the world so that new hybrids are constantly generated precisely through the attempt to delineate ambiguous alterity.

Consequently lost cities, lost tribes, lost species and lost explorers were either discovered or discarded.

But nonetheless even with the modern categories of science all kinds of quasi-humans (cannibals and criminals), or shape-shifting beings (shamans, water and forest spirits), as well as illegible and uncategorized identities (Caboclos, garimpeiros, white Indians and wild tribes) proliferated and continue to inhabit this region.

Partitioned amongst six nation-states the space of Guayana still eludes cartographic surveillance.

Guayana

Guyana

Guianas (British, Dutch and French)

Guayana- Essequiba

Indeed even naming this space bounded by the Amazon Rio Negro, Orinoco and Atlantic is problematic as variant spellings of the name abound, reflecting the persistent uncertainty as to where such names designate – (mail to Guyana often ends up in Ghana)

Guyana is a modern nation state, the Guianas is a collection of colonial enclaves, Guyana-Essequiba is that part of the nation of Guyana claimed by Venezuela, while Guayana is the current technical term for the macro-region.

At the same time this is also Weyana, the indigenous term for a mountain in the heart of the region where the good people of the earth still wait to be born.

And it is also the Encanche of the Amazonian Caboclos, a parallel world under the waters of the great rivers or in the deep trackless forests. The Encanche doubles our world but there the ancient spirits rule and treat well those they kidnap from the grim realities of modern life,

In order to illustrate these processes of cartographic exorcism and invention of multiple modern spaces for “Guyana” I will briefly trace the progressive disenchantment of native meaning from the maps relating to this region, and also show how peculiar forms of modernist magic have re-codified this space.

In particular, along with other visual and cultural tropes of the space of Guayana, the fabled lake of Manoa, on which stood the great and golden city of El Dorado, is a very striking way in which this process can be traced – “mapped out” – if you will.

As we shall see in the maps below the progressive exorcism of El Dorado illustrated in the erasure of first Amazon and Headless-Men (as in Hondius’s map) through the drying- up of the Lake Parime (Manoa or Rupununi) and then the final emplacement of science and commerce through ethnology and the multinational mining corporation.

Such exorcisms of the wild, savage and un-modern perfectly expresses this passage from native antiquity to colonial modernity, from savage wilderness to civilized nation.

Maps of Guayana 1540 - 2009

Jodocus Hondius the Elder

Guyana, 1707, illustrating Ralegh’s voyage of 1592, Leiden

Guiljelmus Blaew - Map Guiana, Venezuela, and El Dorado - 1629

CASSANI, JOSÉ. Historia de la Provincia de La Compañia de Jesus del Nuevo Reyno de Granada en la America, Madrid 1741

Guyane, 1745, Paris

London, 1781, from Political Magazine

Raif Effendi - Guyana, Surinam, Amapa, Üsküdar (Istanbul), 1803.

Agustin Codazzi- Cantón Upata de la Provincia de Guayana. Atlas físico y político de la República de Venezuela, 1840.

Capt. J. E. Alexander - Map of interior of British Guiana based on writings of William Hilhouse and others, ca. 1825

Richard Schomburgk, map fragment, London 1835

Richard Schomburgk, Georgetown, 1838

Edward Goodall - Maps of British Guiana and Trinidad, incorporating scenes from the Schomburgk expeditions, ca 1840

John Tallis, Map of Guyana from the Illustrated Atlas, London, 1851

20th Century Ethnological Map of the Guianas from Handbook of South American Indians, Washington 1948. (The Amerindian logo appears on all the volumes)

Maps showing the distributions of pottery and mounds in Guyana, 21st century

Mining and Minerals in Guyana - the modernist El Dorado