Maboya, the name the savage Caribs of the Antilles give to the devil or spirit whose malign will they fear; it is for this reason that they devote to the maboya alone a sort of cult, fabricating in his honor small figurines out of wood, bizarre and hideous, which they place in the front of their canoes and sometimes in their huts.

When digging in the ground one often finds several of these figurines, made out of terra cotta, or a greenish stone, or from a resin that resembles yellow amber; it is a type of copal that flows naturally from a large tree called courbaril . See Courbaril.

These ancient idols take different forms: some represent the misshapen heads of parrots or frogs, others resemble short-tailed lizards or even squatting monkeys, always with parts that designate the female sex. There are some that have some resemblance to the face of a bat; others, finally, are so deformed, that it is almost impossible to compare them to anything. The number of these idols, which are encountered at certain depths among clay pots and other utensils, can lead to the conjecture that the ancient savages buried them with their dead.

It is customary among the Caribs still to use the word maboya to express everything that is evil: also, when they smell a bad odor, they cry, making a grimace, maboya, caye, en en , as in a similar situation we sometimes say, it’s the devil .