María Lionza on Her White Tapir

She sits on her tapir like a queen sits on a throne.

The statue in Caracas, on the highway to the airport, shows her naked and powerful on the tapir’s back, arms raised, spine arched, a figure of absolute natural authority who needs no garment because the forest is her garment. The sculptor Francisco Narváez made her in 1951, and she became immediately and obviously the right image: this is María Lionza, this is who she is, this is why millions of Venezuelans feel the pull toward her mountain.

She is the spirit of the Yurubí River valley in the mountains of Yaracuy, the green and dense country of western Venezuela where the forest is wet and the rivers are strong and the mountains have a specific quality of presence that the people who live near them describe as inhabited. Sorte Mountain is her home, and Sorte Mountain is a pilgrimage site year-round, crowded especially on October 12 — the Day of Indigenous Resistance, formerly Columbus Day — when her devotees come from across Venezuela to perform the ceremonies that maintain their relationship with her.

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She has origins that predate Columbus.

The Jirajara and Ayamán indigenous peoples who lived in the Yaracuy region had a nature spirit connected to the river and the mountain — a female spirit, the protector of the forest and its animals. After the conquest, this spirit was adapted to the new religious landscape: she acquired the name María (after the Virgin), the title Lionza (possibly from a corruption of a local place name), and she absorbed elements of the African orisha tradition brought by enslaved people into the region.

The Trinity that organizes her cult is itself a syncretic statement: María Lionza (the indigenous-African-Catholic spirit of nature), Guaicaipuro (the historical Caracas chief who resisted Spanish conquest, now a spirit), and Negro Felipe (a figure representing the enslaved African dimension of Venezuelan identity). This Trinity mirrors the three peoples who made Venezuela: the indigenous, the enslaved African, and — less prominently — the European colonizer.

She rides the tapir because the tapir is the largest land mammal in South America, one of the oldest species on the continent, an animal that has survived from the Pleistocene. The tapir is the forest made heavy and patient and enduring. To ride the tapir is to be carried by the forest’s own permanence.

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The ceremony at Sorte Mountain is not one ceremony.

The cult of María Lionza has no central organization, no fixed liturgy, no priesthood that holds authority over the tradition as a whole. There are hundreds of spirit-workers (materia, espiritistas, marialionceros) who practice in their own ways, with their own spirit pantheons, their own healing techniques, their own relationships to the spirits. Some ceremonies use fire-walking. Some use elaborate possession sequences involving dozens of different spirits from different courts. Some are quiet, focused, herbalist in their primary expression.

What they share: the invocation of a natural world that is spiritually alive, the relationship with the spirits that requires respect and reciprocity, and the central figure of the woman on the tapir who is both the forest’s intelligence and the Venezuelan people’s own complex, painful, beautiful history made into a goddess.

She looks down from Sorte Mountain.

She has seen the conquest. She has seen the independence. She has seen the oil boom and the poverty and the diaspora.

She is still there.

The river still runs from her mountain.