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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 1
st
- 3
rd
centuries AD and even they encode ethnological
judgments. However, they are not visual representations of places but rather verbal
iterations of routes between places.
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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 Ortelios 16
th
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

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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.

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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.


Snakes and Dragons are also important guardian spirits esak of gold bearing deposits and
ritual spaces in indigenous mythologies
Roman
representation of
the genius loci
Fresco in Pompeii, ca.
60-79 A.D


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.

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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 19
th
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 12
th
century

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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

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Jodocus Hondius the Elder, Leo Belgicus, 1611


This kind of anthropomorphic map became a key way of seeing the nation in 19
th
century
and into the 20
th
century.
Emrik & Binger, New map of Europe, Haarlem 1870


And in places as diverse as Finland and Brazil

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Seeing the nation
in Finland and Sao Paulo, early 20
th
century
1948
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

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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
Guianas
(British,
Dutch and
French)
Guyana
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)

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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 Hondiuss 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

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Jodocus Hondius the Elder




12
Guyana, 1707, illustrating Raleghs voyage of 1592, Leiden


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


13
CASSANI, JOS. Historia de la Provincia de La Compaia de Jesus del Nuevo Reyno de
Granada en la America, Madrid 1741


Guyane, 1745, Paris


14
London, 1781, from Political Magazine


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


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Agustin Codazzi- Cantn Upata de la Provincia de Guayana.
Atlas fsico y poltico de la Repblica de Venezuela, 1840.


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


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Richard Schomburgk, map fragment, London 1835


Richard Schomburgk, Georgetown, 1838


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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


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20
th
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,
21
st
century


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Mining and Minerals in Guyana - the modernist El Dorado