Early ethnohistorical sources indicate that Atabey was known under several names. In the
Relación acerca de las antigüedades de los indios (c. 1498), written by the Jeronymite friar Ramón Pané and generally considered the earliest account of Taíno religious beliefs, the mother of the supreme being is said to have been known by five different names. The original manuscript of Pané’s report has not survived, and the passage is preserved only through later textual traditions transmitted by early sixteenth-century chroniclers, notably the Latin summary by Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, passages incorporated by Bartolomé de las Casas, and the Italian version published by Alfonso de Ulloa. Differences among these witnesses—such as Latinized spellings and the fusion or division of words—reflect the complex transmission history of the text. The historiography of Taíno religion has offered several interpretations of these names and their meanings. José Juan Arrom interpreted the theonym
Atabey as referring to a primordial maternal principle often associated with freshwater and fertility in Taíno cosmology. Other studies in Caribbean ethnohistory have emphasized its meaning as a revered or ancestral mother within the indigenous religious system. Scholars have also proposed different explanations for the discrepancies between the lists preserved in the Anglerian and Ulloan traditions. Some analyses attribute these variations to processes of textual transmission, including the Latinization of indigenous names, orthographic fluctuation, and the accidental fusion of words in Renaissance copies. Other interpretations have defended the primacy of the tradition transmitted by Peter Martyr d’Anghiera and proposed etymological explanations for the names recorded in that version, interpreting them as symbolic epithets describing attributes of the deity. ==Mythology==