Etymon #9
Outside the cup
Borrowed from Spanish, the word entered English in 1555. Its original sense was nothing to do with what the word now describes: it named something held to be a power in the world.
Two Spanish chroniclers recorded the word from indigenous speakers in the early sixteenth century. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, writing his history of the Indies in the 1540s, gave it one spelling. Peter Martyr, chaplain at the Spanish court, gave it another. Richard Eden's 1555 translation preserved both forms side by side, and English took more than a century to settle on a single version.
The original meaning was the name of a god. In the cosmology of the Taíno people of the Caribbean, the supreme mother goddess Atabey had a violent counterpart called Guabancex. She worked through two named assistants, Guataubá and Coatrisquie, each summoning a different aspect of the natural disorder she commanded. To speak the word was to invoke that divine retinue and the chaos it could loose upon the world.
The Spanish chronicles of the early sixteenth century brought English a small family of indigenous Caribbean words, including HAMMOCK and BARBECUE. Both come from Taíno. So does this word.
