In the ancestral practices of the aborigines of Borikén and other Caribbean islands, the spirit of the dead was venerated, because thanks to these spirits who had already departed to the spiritual plane, our ancestors had the opportunity to experience life on the earthly plane in the Caribbean Antilles. The function of the lord of the abode of the absent was to maintain the balance between the antagonistic forces of day and night, between the order of the world of the living and the disorder of the world of the dead.

This is what Fray Ramón Pané tells in chapters XII and XIII of “The Report on the Antiquities of the Indians”:

 

Chapter XII:

 

    “They believe that there is a place where the dead go, called Coabey, which is at one end of the island, called Soraya. The first person to be in Coabey was someone called Maquetaurie Guayaba, who was the lord of Coabey, the house and dwelling place of the dead.”

 

Chapter XIII:

 

    “They say that during the day the dead are secluded; at night they go to recreation and eat a certain fruit called guava and go with the living. To know the dead they have this way: they touch their belly with their hand, and if they do not find the navel they say that it is operito, which means dead, because they say that the dead do not have a navel; and thus they sometimes deceive themselves, because not noticing this, they lie with some woman from Coabey, and when they think of embracing them, they have nothing, because they suddenly disappear. Such is what they believe about this to this day, while a person is alive they call him goeiz, and after death they call him opia; The goeiz, they say, appears many times, either in the form of a man or a woman, and they affirm that there has been a man who dared to fight with a goeiz and, trying to embrace him, he would disappear and the Indian would put his arms further up, on top of some trees, from which he would hang. Everyone generally believes this, both young and old, and also that the dead appear to him in the form of a father, a mother, brothers, relatives or other forms. The fruit that the dead are said to feed on is the size of a peach. The dead do not appear to him during the day, but only at night, and for this reason, not without great fear, some Indians dare to go alone at night.

 

    It is for this reason that it is related to bats, to the opías and to Maquetaurie Guayaba; etymologically related to the Arawak kokke, kaku, “living life” preceded by the privative “Ma” would be equivalent to “without life”.