The origin of the official main symbol of the Caney Indian Spiritual Circle lies deep in the ancient graphic imagery of the Tainos.
Caney traditions teach us that in the beginning Ata Bey gave birth to a male spirit called Yoca Hu. It was important for Her to do this if there was to be a Creation, for the powers of the Male and the Female are both necessary for the process of Creation.
The spirits teach us that Yoca Hu and Ata Bey united in creative magic and from this Cosmic Union came the primordial pregnancy. In time the fertile Mother begat all of creation, and the Cosmos was born from Her womb.
In Taino iconography there is a way to symbolize the male and female elements of Nature. Considering that the ancient tainos had a totally different sense of propriety than that in which we live today in most technological countries, and considering that they had a frank and unabashed manner of representing maleness and femaleness the reader should appreciate these symbols from the perspective of the frank earthy culture that produced them and not from the culture in which we now live. In most cases gender was symbolized through the use of human anatomical representation. A quite graphic and frankly anatomical artistic representation of what the Tainos meant to present in this imagery can be viewed by clicking this link. (Do not click if you are offended by graphic representation of human sexual organs.)
The best example of the imagery of the GUA symbol is found on an archelogical artifact that we in the Caney call the “UNITY VASE”. This curious object is an obvious representation of combined male and female elements united in one ceramic piece. The female element is represented by two female breasts, and the male element is created by a phallus that forms the spout. On the “nipple” area of each one of the breasts there appears a representation of the GUA symbol.