JAGUARS

JAGUARS . The jaguar (Panthera onca ) is the largest native American cat, and for over three thousand years it has been one of Central and South America's most important symbolic animals. Sometimes associated with the puma (Felis concolor ) and ocelot (Felis pardalis ), the jaguar was a recurring motif in the religious iconography of many major pre-Columbian civilizations, including the Olmec, Maya, and Aztec in Mesoamerica and the Chavín and Moche in South America. In the twenty-first century, throughout tropical rain-forest areas, the jaguar still plays an important role in the spiritual beliefs of indigenous Amerindian societies.

As with all animal symbols, jaguar imagery is more than artistic depiction. It represents the symbolic joining of animal and human features and qualities and epitomizes the ways physical attributes and supernatural qualities could be fused to represent deities, spirits, shamans, and divine rulers. Beautiful and deadly, the jaguar's strength and agility made it a paragon of predatory male human virtues associated with hunters, warriors, sacrifice, and war. Its stealth, night vision, and nocturnal hunting habits identified it with sorcery and the spirit realm. Its widespread status as "Master of Animals" probably derives from its ability to hunt on land, up trees, and in water, and from the fact that while all animals are its prey, it is prey to none. Only humans kill jaguars, a fact that may account for the perception that both share a spiritual equivalence as equals.

In Mesoamerica the jaguar icon first appeared in the art of the Olmec civilization (1250–400 bce) as monumental stone sculptures and intricate jade carvings, such as those found at sites such as La Venta and San Lorenzo in eastern Mexico. A common image is a half-human, half-feline creature with characteristic downturned snarling mouth, which has been interpreted as a were-jaguar—the supernatural offspring of Olmec rulers and mythical jaguar beings. Some sculptures depict what are regarded as shamans transforming into spirit felines. Broadly contemporary was the cult center of Chavín de Huántar in Peru (850–200 bce), where startling images of jaguars and animals and humans with jaguar features were carved in stone, cast in gold, and worked in textiles and pottery. A decorative frieze at Chavín shows a procession of carved-stone jaguars and humans with feline fangs and claws, some of which appear associated with the hallucinogenic San Pedro cactus and which in turn indicates a shamanic religion.

Once established, the symbolic and spiritual relationship between the jaguar and human elites appears to have become a widespread phenomenon. As an icon linking spiritual dominance, rulership, sacrifice, and war, jaguar imagery became a recurring feature in art. Among Mesoamerica's Classic Maya (250–850 ce), jaguar pelts were worn by dynastic warrior kings and were used to cover royal thrones, themselves sometimes carved in feline form, as at Palenque and Chichén Itzá. Elsewhere, jaguar and ocelot apparel featured as war regalia, and jaguar imagery was associated with hieroglyphic texts referring to war and human sacrifice.

Royal titles incorporated the jaguar icon, and deceased kings were sometimes buried with the animal's skin, claws, and fangs. The sacrifice of fifteen jaguars by Yax Pac, king of Copán, to his ancestors suggests a spiritual identity between royalty and the jaguar, exemplified perhaps by the Classic Maya jaguar god of the underworld. At the later Toltec-Maya city of Chichén Itzá, jaguars appear eating what may be human hearts—perhaps symbolic representations of human sacrifice by a jaguar warrior elite. On Peru's north coast, jaguar imagery was similarly associated with warfare and human sacrifice in the Moche culture (100–650 ce). Master potters depicted sacrificial victims, perhaps prisoners of war, alongside jaguar figures, mountains, and possibly the San Pedro cactus. Anthropomorphic figures appear with snarling jaguar fangs, giving the impression of a shamanic religion based on the transformation of powerful individuals into a supernatural jaguar being.

The jaguar played an equally important, though better documented, role in Mesoamerican Aztec religion and iconography. Known as ocelotl, it was regarded as the bravest of beasts, proud "ruler of the animal world." Its association with warfare was acknowledged in eponymous metaphors describing valiant soldiers, such as the elite Jaguar Warrior Society (ocelomeh ). Religion, mythology, and astrology combined in the belief that those born under the calendrical sign ocelotl shared the jaguar's aggressive nature and were well suited to a warrior's life. Aztec sorcerers wielded the jaguar's pelt and claws as magical weapons during nocturnal rituals.

Aztec rulers also appropriated jaguar imagery. The emperor wore jaguar apparel in war and held court seated on thrones draped with the animal's pelt. Tezcatlipoca, the supreme Aztec deity, was patron of royalty and inventor of sacrifice whose alter ego was a huge jaguar known as Tepeyolotl. At the center of the Aztec universe—the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan (Mexico City)—complete feline bodies were interred with balls of jade gripped in their fangs. The temple was regarded mythologically as the "cosmic water mountain," jade symbolized water, and the jaguar was associated with fertility.

The metaphysical associations of the pre-Columbian jaguar survived into the colonial period, merging with the imagery of Old World lions and tigers and influenced by Christian beliefs. The animal's spiritual ambivalence, variously signifying good and evil, fertility and death, also persisted. In sixteenth-century Mexico sorcerers known as nahuallis were accused by the Spanish of devil worship, murder, insurrection, and changing into jaguars. Elsewhere in Mesoamerica the jaguar became Christ's defender, its pelt symbolizing its protective role in the passion. At the Maya village of Chamula, in the highlands of the Mexican state of Chiapas, there is a New Year ritual called the "Jaguar Skin Dance" understood as part of Christ's passion. During this dance, civil and religious leaders take turns to dance wearing a jaguar skin that symbolizes God's jaguar, which defended Christ against demons. The one who wears the skin impersonates the defender of Christ. Images of the jaguar also replaced the lion at the feet of St. Jerome, and for the Maya of Chamula only civic leaders and shamans could have the jaguar as their animal soul companion. In Colombia, by contrast, aggressive aspects of jaguar imagery were mobilized against the Spanish in the ferocious "tiger men" who fought the white invaders.

In modern Central and South America, jaguar masks and costumes are popular folk art items. In rural areas they are worn by dancers in religiously syncretic springtime festivals that mix Catholic beliefs with pre-Columbian ideas concerning the protection of crops and livestock. In remoter areas of Mexico echoes of ancient blood rituals survive in fiestas, where young men dressed as jaguars fight to spill blood for the jaguar deity, who then sends rain to fertilize the maize. Jaguar masks can be mainly decorative and made of wood or fabric and worn as part of dance costumes, as at the village of Totoltepec in the Mexican state of Guerrero. They can also be more like helmets, made from toughened wild pig skin, and worn as protection during violent ritualised fights between young men dressed as jaguars, as at the villages of Acatlán and Zitlala, also in the Mexican state of Guerrero.

In the tropical rain-forests of lowland South America, the jaguar remains a more visceral spiritual force as well as a feared and admired predator. In Amazonian mythology the jaguar was the original possessor of fire, though now only a reflected glow can be seen in its mirrored eyes. Jaguar metaphors signify bravery in battle and success in hunting, both in the physical world and the supernatural realm, where it is the spirit helper of shamans and chiefs. For Amazonian Indians, meeting a jaguar on a jungle path can be an unnerving experience, as one can never be sure whether it is the natural animal, the shade of an ancestor, or a malevolent shaman-turned-jaguar on a mission of vengeance against some enemy.

As the natural jaguar is the rain-forest's most powerful and resourceful hunter, so the supernatural jaguar is the most potent and dangerous spiritual force. Dominant shamans identify themselves with the jaguar, their reputation as successful curers based on their superior ability to defeat illness-bearing spirits. These jaguar-shamans may wear necklaces of jaguar fangs and claws, growl during trance, and eat the animal's magical strength-giving flesh. The spiritual equivalence between jaguars and shamans is sometimes made explicit in the widespread belief that, under the influence of hallucinogens, some shamans transform into jaguars in body as well as spirit.

See Also

Mesoamerican Religions; South American Indian Religions.

Bibliography

Benson, Elizabeth P. "The Classic Maya Use of Jaguar Accessories." In Fourth Palenque Round Table, 1980, edited by Elizabeth P. Benson, pp. 155–156. San Francisco, 1985.

Benson, Elizabeth P. "The Lord, the Ruler: Jaguar Symbolism in the Americas." In Icons of Power: Feline Symbolism in the Americas, edited by Nicholas J. Saunders, pp. 53–76. London, 1998.

Furst, Peter T. "The Olmec Were-Jaguar Motif in the Light of Ethnographic Reality." In Dumbarton Oaks Conference on the Olmec, edited by Elizabeth P. Benson, pp. 143–175. Washington, D.C., 1968.

Kubler, George. "Jaguars in the Valley of Mexico." In The Cult of the Feline, edited by Elizabeth P. Benson, pp. 19–49. Washington, D.C., 1972.

Reichel-Dolmatoff, Gerardo. The Shaman and the Jaguar: A Study of Narcotic Drugs among the Indians of Colombia. Philadelphia, 1975.

Roe, Peter G. "Paragon or Peril? The Jaguar in Amazonian Indian Society." In Icons of Power: Feline Symbolism in the Americas, edited by Nicholas J. Saunders, pp. 171–202. London, 1998.

Saunders, Nicholas J. "The Day of the Jaguar: Rainmaking in a Mexican Village." Geographical Magazine 55 (1983): 398–405.

Saunders, Nicholas J. "Tezcatlipoca: Jaguar Metaphors and the Aztec Mirror of Nature." In Signifying Animals: Human Meaning in the Natural World, edited by Roy G. Willis, pp. 159–177. London, 1990.

Saunders, Nicholas J. "Architecture of Symbolism: The Feline Image." In Icons of Power: Feline Symbolism in the Americas, edited by Nicholas J. Saunders, pp. 12–52. London, 1998.

Nicholas J. Saunders (2005)