The cult of the feline pdf download

The bust form appears as a cremation bundle in Codex Nuttall, f. Drawing of mural on dado showing a coyote left and a netted jaguar right within a frame of entwined serpentine jaguar and coyote bodies. The netted jaguars have feathered bird eyes and bifid serpent tongues.

Under the mouths of both creatures appear trilobed water-signs Neys and von Winning like those common in Oaxaca. In the border the watery sign is augmented by an eye signifying the brightness of running water. The water theme reappears in the upper-wall border, where goggled rain-faces appear among the twining bodies of netted jaguars and coyotes. We are invited to consider the union of cat and dog as connected in some unexplained way with water in various forms.

The dog-and-cat themes appear again on a tripod cylinder published by von Winning Fig. A netted quadruped Canis latrans is the North American prairie wolf. Pedro Armillas reported finding clay plaques with coyote and jaguar figures as decorations of the final rebuilding at the patio pintado of Atetelco see C. Jaguars in the Valley of Mexico Neither jaguar nor coyote was unknown in the Valley of Mexico, but the coyote was most common in dry northern plateaus, while jaguars abounded in the humid lowlands of Veracruz and Tabasco.

These latter-day beliefs of the Aztec were summarized on textual and archaeological evidence by Eduard Seler 47off. These associations have in common only the idea of darkness as expressed by night, caves, eclipses, and the disappearance of the sun. Palenque at the three temple buildings where highland and lowland peoples may be represented Kubler 19 in a ritual of unification. George Kubler Fig. Drawing of incised stone slub. Danzante 41, Mound J after Caso Fig.

The figure wears the jaguar-serpent-bird mask and carries darts. The weapons may only characterize a person in command, rather than expressing the aggressiveness of the cult to which he belongs. The compounding of properties suggested by jaguar, serpent, and bird elements, as emblems of water, earth, and air, points rather more to transcendent powers of a metaphysical nature than to a cult of war.

Olmec jaguars usually are humans who wear either jaguar dress or a mouth mask conferring the jaguar aspect. The wearers of this gear were possibly priests or chiefs who assumed different combinations of apparel for different rituals. This behavior also appeared among the early peoples of Oaxaca.

A severed jaguar head is brandished in the left hand, while the right hand carries a flint knife. In later periods the jaguar forms of Oaxaca are limited to these same costume traits worn by humans, and to jaguar-paw vessels. Mural showing frontal jaguar-serpent-bird icon as a bust, grasping darts and wearing jaguar-foot claws. George Kubler d g Fig. The topic assigned me was jaguars in the Valley of Mexico. When the new Post-Classic peoples began to use the jaguar-serpent-bird form, it was already two thousand years older than they, and it had changed meaning from a miscegenated Olmec were-jaguar to a transcendent spirit compounded of various animal powers.

The new folk in due time used the variants as they saw fit. Spinden Jaguars in the Valley of Mexico 39 was the first to collect some of the regional varieties of this form in Maya art Fig. The new people transformed the jaguar and the eagle into a symbol of warfare conveyed by the complementary images of these creatures.

The earlier compounds of the jaguar were converted to other purposes. Early colonial mural in the Franciscan convent depicting the Annunciation, flanked by jaguar and eagle.

This separation was probably meant, among other things, to factor out jaguar traits for separate treatment. Its effects are visible at the Museo Nacional in one of the great jaguar images of all time Fig. The penitential deities, Tezcatlipoca and Tlahuizcalpantecutli, draw blood from their earlobes in a rite of blood-gift closely connected with the eagle-and-jaguar warrior cult according to Seler The jaguar now has a teardrop eye.

Our last image is an illustration of one of the rare survivals of Pre-Conquest imagery in colonial Christian art Fig. It is a fresco in the sixteenth-century Franciscan church at Cuauhtinchan in the state of Puebla.

The Annunciation, which marks the displacement of the Old Testament by the New Law and the beginning of a new world age, is shown flanked by a jaguar and an eagle.

These positions were usually reserved in Christian iconography for the moon and the sun as symbols of night and day. In Handbook of Middle American Indians, vol. University of Texas Press, Austin. Onceava mesa redonda, pp. In manuscript. Memoirs of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, vol. New Haven. Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, vol. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, HALL n.

Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California, Notes on Middle American Archaeology and Ethnology, no. Carnegie Institution, Washington. Stanford University Press, Stanford. Second edition. Norman, Oklahoma. XI, XII. American Antiquity, vol. Salt Lake City. Baessler-Archiv, New Series, vol. But I think there have been a number of find-places of coyotes in the Valley of Mexico.

Coyotes get all the way down into the Olmec area. Not far from San Lorenzo there are coyotes near a place called Cerro de la Encantada; also around nearby Jaltipan. As a matter of fact, they overlap with jaguars. As you know, jaguars occur all the way up the western side of Mexico into Arizona and even Texas.

They do coexist. That is, there is reason to believe that they were not formerly in some parts of the lowland tropical area that they are in now. As a matter of fact, it is one of the few primary grasslands; that is, the coyotes inhabit the edge of the grasslands into the forest. And they are also found in the drier areas of the isthmus.

I would like to point out that coyotes also have a serrated brow around the eye. A flame eyebrow, or a serrated eyebrow, would be an element in the game. All of these are parts of the apparatus of representation which is an exercise in imitation. It is very much like the classical doctrine of mimesis, the imitation, not of nature, as in the ancient world, but of ritual.

They go around with their tongues hanging out and moisture dripping from their mouths. Reichel-Dolmatoff probably can talk about better than I—and that is that the jaguar is very often called the dog of the shaman. So you have an association of cat and dog. I have a comment on one other point that Dr. Kubler made, and that is the jaguar-eagleserpent association. I think this is very ancient. Maybe it goes back to Asia, where you get the association of the bird, the tiger, and the serpent, which becomes the dragon.

All through tropical South America you have jaguar, bird, and serpent. The other thing is the continuity of the jaguar. It never ceases being, at the same time, the symbol of sorcery and shamanism. We can assume that this is a very ancient trait. You get it also in Mexico and in Asia, where the shaman is identified with the tiger.

George Kubler DR. I wish we could stick to alpha, beta, and gamma, because I suspect that a lot of the things that we identify as owls by the feathers around the eyes could easily be eagles. I call it owl because he sees it as owl. There is always this problem of identification; we are always on shifting sand because of this game of plugging in different parts to round out an idea that is being conveyed. Many of these eye surrounds are clearly linked to butterfly representations.

Do you feel the same way about the coyote with whom he is Jaguars in the Valley of Mexico associated? Therefore war, or at least weapons, is present in this single group of buildings that were obviously painted at the same time. Although weapons do not occur in that fresco, that particular problem still seems to be involved there and needs to be explained. K UBLER: First, there is certainly no reason to preclude multiple meanings at all times; a cult image can have one system of associations for one group of faithful, and another set of applications for another.

Santiago becomes a military saint, the saint of the conquering Spaniards. This sort of interpenetration of behaviors on the same symbol is not at all uncommon. As to the point about the ethnicity of these animal representations, the notion of their southernness and northernness was pure guess—with very little to back it in the case of the coyote, as Michael Coe pointed out.

I was led to it by what I had observed at Palenque in the Temples of the Cross, the Foliated Cross, and the Sun, where there is always a pair of figures, one of them muffled up, obviously wearing the clothes of someone coming out of the cold weather, and the other wearing very little. They are repeated three times, confronting each other in different aspects of a ritual. I suggested that there was a contrast of lowland and highland in the observances of a cult, and I was extending this to the interpretation of the jaguar and the coyote.

GRIFFIN: Could the net costume be not a net but a series of olin symbols, a network meaning energy or movement, the olin being the singular of a net? The way they are woven and the way they are depicted suggest olins, especially on that thing they are worshiping in the center of the Casa de los Barrios mural and on the fresco here at Dumbarton Oaks.

Michael Coe also implied this in his paper. There is the mural, which you showed, depicting a man holding a small, netted jaguar. I see a similarity in theme in that perhaps the earlier one is a presentation of the young ruler and the later one—since it is well known that the maguey plant flowers just before dying—is a representation of an old ruler.

The only thing in the Olmec area and in the Maya area which is similar in theme is the infant presentation. I am thinking of the numerous werejaguar infants that are presented by priestlike figures; the only example in the Maya area that I can think of is the Bonampak presentation scene. That is still a whole textual chapter of the history of the Valley of Mexico that needs to be worked out in better detail than we have. You will recall that Eric Thomspon points out in his Maya Hieroglyphic Writing that the representation of the sun in its night aspect takes on jaguar characteristics: the face of the sun takes the ears of a jaguar.

At Palenque in the socalled Temple of the Sun, the image between the two figures is actually a shield of the night sun as a jaguar with crossed spears.

David Kelley has written a very interesting paper in which he suggests that the entire temple is dedicated to the god of war, to the idea of warfare. I would therefore suggest that this idea of the night aspect of the jaguar and the jaguar as war symbol is older than Tula. George Kubler though, I have an impression that the jaguar is a daylight creature, not a night creature.

It is seen surrounded by shells, and actually swimming in water and flowers. This is something you also have in Maya art, where, as Thompson suggested, the jaguar stands for the earth as it floats in water surrounded by flowers. This might bring us back to the idea of earth and perhaps underworld and water, taking it back to the Olmec.

Are kings water priests—is that really how the two fit together? Richard Evans Schultes at Harvard has identified the flower—we worked on this together—as most likely the morning glory, ololiuhqui. If you look at the procession of jaguars, particularly on some vases in plano-relief, you will find priests and jaguars or a group of jaguars marching along like human beings with scrolls issuing from their muzzles with these flowers attached to them.

C OE : I go back to the original statement by Thompson, his identification of the jaguar as a sign for the night sun, the jaguar trans- formation of the sun—the sun goes under the earth, disappears, and becomes a jaguar. I Jaguars in the Valley of Mexico ley of Mexico.

Ololiuhqui apparently came primarily from the Xochicalco area, near Cuernavaca; it is not very common in the valley of Mexico itself, but very abundant at the south. The idea of using hallucinogens and transformation by the priests seems to be expressed here in these jaguar representations, but no one as far as I know has commented on the botanical identity of this flower.

I gave a paper in Mexico City on this and some of the other better-known hallucinogens, as represented in Pre-Columbian art. Another problem that ought to be investigated more thoroughly is that of the association of jaguar and toad.

Like so many other motifs this extends from Mesoamerica right down into northern South America. On the one hand you have the jaguar as alter ego of shamans and chiefly lineages, on the other you have the toad as a transformation symbol, as originator of culti- 49 gens and in South America even as the Mother of Jaguars.

One cannot help but feel that this is somehow related to the fact that toad skin contains powerful poisons with hallucinogenic constituents and that the poison of toads and certain frogs is utilized in shamanistic and magical practices by anumber of South American forest tribes whose shamans are identified with jaguars. Also there is the ancient practice of adding poisonous toads to fermented ritual beverages in highland Guatemala.

We need much closer cooperation with other disciplines, particularly ethnobotany, to understand the significance of some of these associations of plants and animals in Pre-Hispanic art. Jaguar copulating with a woman. The feline motif is found in almost every region of the country, in varying stages of elaboration and in different materials, from simple clay modelings to complex pottery vessels, from small stone figurines to gigantic statues, and from wood or shell carvings to intricate gold castings.

These statues which are found standing on hilltops and mountain slopes seem to have had a variety of functions; some were public monuments which stood on prominent spots while others were exclusively of a funerary character and were buried together with the dead in subterranean chambers built of large slabs and covered with earthen mounds. The sculptures fall into several categories: large freestanding statues carved fully in the round, relief-carved slabs, isolated heads, boulder carvings, bedrock carvings, and small peg-shaped figures.

The marked divergences in style make it extremely difficult to establish categories of form and expression. The schemata for the representation of bodily forms are mainly the same in threedimensional sculpture and in relief carvings. An almost straight-sided trunk, with high square shoulders, is surmounted by an enormous head; the thin flat arms hang down or are bent stiffly at the elbows, the hands clutching some objects in jointless fingers or simply meeting over the chest, empty and in a rigid pose.

The lower part of the body, the legs and feet, are barely outlined, the whole figure, because of the hunched shoulders, appearing to lean slightly forward. Otherwise, the body hardly ever expresses any movement or emotion. It is the face, the grim mouth, and the huge eyes, in which all expressive force is concentrated; the body seems to be only a base, a ELINE 1. Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff plinth, meant to sustain the head, the masklike face which is the true center of the sculpture.

A few statues represent a rather naturalistic jaguar, shown in a crouching position, but in the majority of cases the statues show a combination of human and feline features, a monstrous being, half man, half jaguar. The sculptures show a heavily compressed body with a large head, the composite features of which represent a fanged creature in the shape of a snarling feline.

The body, no matter how distorted and compressed, is essentially a human body; the arms end in fingers, not in claws; and the legs, however shortened, are human legs. Even eyes and ears are human although the former vary greatly and sometimes have a catlike slant. The short flattened nose with its flaring alae, although quite out of proportion, is more human than animal, and so are the deep furrowed lines which often separate the mouth from the cheeks.

Although all these features are grotesquely deformed, conceptually they are human, but by their very exaggeration they readily blend with the bestial mouth into a dreadful nonhuman face.

One statue carries a coiled snake, another a fish, and others hold in their hands some unidentified objects, but there is no fixed pattern and clearly diagnostic attributes seem to be absent. Decorative elements which adorn these statues are not frequent either and, when present, do not show any recurrent characteristics. Nor is it possible to associate the jaguar-monster with particular sites such as shrines, mounds, or habitations.

The statues with the feline motif are found in all these contexts, ceremonial and domestic; in burials, near middens, and on house sites. The marked differences in form, expression, and technique can probably be attributed to differences in time, but we cannot yet arrange the major categories of sculptures into a sequence which would show us the chronological and iconographical developments of the feline motif.

The earliest carbon date goes back to the sixth century B. The problem of interpretation, then, is a most difficult one. But this may be just as well. It is obvious that in the two high-culture areas to the north and south of Colombia the jaguar motif has undergone—especially during the Classic and Post-Classic periods—a much more complex development than among the less advanced cultures of the Intermediate Area where, it seems, the motif presents far more simple, fundamental characteristics.

This may be an advantage because there are fewer variants and ramifications, and we are, perhaps, closer to the original sources of jaguar imagery. However, under the circumstances I have pointed out before, any attempt at interpretation in strictly archaeological terms is greatly limited by the lack of chronological sequences and contextual units. I shall rather try to examine some broader, underlying ideas which, I believe, are very widespread, deeply rooted, and possibly significant to our inquiry and, in doing so, I shall take frequent recourse to ethnological analogies.

I am referring to certain sculptures which show a jaguar in the act of overpowering a smaller figure which represents a human being. A reexamination of this stone carving, however, does not bear out this identification and it rather appears that the animal is a jaguar copulating with a woman.

The important point, however, is the recent discovery of another sculpture which is very similar in composition and which shows, beyond any doubt, a jaguar which overpowers a human figure that has marked female characteristics. Besides, the jaguar grasps the figure of a child which lies across the back of the female figure. See Furst ; this paper is of special interest to our discussion. In any case, the feline beast is always shown in close association with human figures and this association obviously constitutes a central theme of an ancient aboriginal belief system which found its concrete expression in these sculptures.

In trying now to discuss this system of beliefs I must refer briefly to the Olmec culture. Among the stone monuments of Potrero Nuevo, Veracruz, Matthew Stirling found a sculpture which he described as representing a jaguar copulating with a woman.

The similarity, of course, does not refer to any stylistic resemblances, but exclusively to a common theme, the idea of a powerful feline which enters into a direct relationship with a member of the human species thus establishing a bond which eventually leads to a close and permanent association which is of a sacred or, at least, otherworldly, character. We must look then for other parallels of this kind, and consider the nature of this man-animal relationship.

This child grew up into a man who became an important culture hero and eventually retired to a lagoon where his spirit continues to dwell. Jaguar representations with spirally coiled tails are frequent in aboriginal wood carvings from the Amazon area. In fact, a prospective shaman receives the supernatural call to his office from thunder, and it is near a lagoon where apprenticeship takes place, accompanied by hallucinatory experiences.

These thunderchildren are most voracious little creatures, each of them having several female servants, young girls whom they kill while growing up, by drinking their blood and milk.

This theme is quite frequent in Colombian Indian mythology and tradition. For example, some of the ancient Chibcha groups of the highlands claimed to be descended from legendary chieftains and shamans who were of jaguar origin Piedrahita 24; Lehmann I.

The eighteenth-century Caribs of the Orinoco Plains traced their descent from mythical jaguars Gumilla 83 and so do certain modern groups of semi-nomadic Indians who still raid Guahibo settlements ReichelDolmatoff The myths of the Kogi Indians of the Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta tell of jaguars which were created at the beginning of time, and of the jaguar-people who were their descendants and, at the same time, the direct ancestors of the modern Kogi Reichel-Dolmatoff Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff Now this is precisely the point: jaguar-descended Indians lived and sometimes still live in fairly close proximity to Indians who did not descend from jaguars, and those of jaguar descent were feared mainly because they abducted the women of nonjaguar people.

As expressed in myth and tradition, the danger personified in the jaguar—to be eaten or devoured—is fundamentally the danger of sexual assault and of the abduction of women. Now many creation myths are basically accounts of the nature and consequences of a primordial sexual act which is incestuous in the case of general human origins, but which is explicitly exogamous in the case of specific social origins, for example when the origin and genealogy of a lineage, clan, or phratry are spoken of.

In Colombian Indian mythology the jaguar is never the progenitor of mankind as a whole, but only of certain groups of it, while other, complementary groups trace their origins to other generative principles. I would suggest that the many myths and tales in which a jaguar abducts a woman, marries or devours her, might sometimes be interpreted as accounts and precepts of exogamic marriage rules. But before going further and in order to establish a tentative conceptual frame of reference, we might ask at this point: what exactly is it the jaguar stands for in this context?

Zoologically speaking, the jaguar impresses the rain-forest Indians I know, not so much because it is powerful, swift, or, perhaps, physically dangerous to the hunter, but rather because it can easily be associated with vital forces which act upon society. The main distinguishing trait is that the jaguar is by far the largest carnivore of the American tropics and that it depends for its food almost exclusively upon herbivores. Herbivores have a wide range of food resources while felines are very specialized animals which depend entirely on the flesh of their prey which, we may note here, are the very same game animals man is hunting for.

This distinction is essential because it provides a ready model for society. The jaguar has to attack in order to survive, and the cunning and bloodthirsty fierceness of his predatory nature are taken by the Indian to be an essentially male attitude which stands in opposition to the passive and fearful attitude of the herbivores who thus acquire a marked female character.

The Indians also point out that the jaguar is a great hunter and that this activity implies a strong erotic element, the act of hunting being equated with a form of courting the game animals Reichel-Dolmatoff The feline is thus seen as a male in pursuit of the female, as a devouring animal which personifies a vital energetic principle in nature. There are then two different, but related, aspects of the jaguar. As a general power symbol with strong male fertility associations the jaguar is certainly a very basic and ancient concept, while as a symbol of exogamy it seems to undergo a specific elaboration in the raiding patterns between wandering hunters and sedentary farmers where the jaguar image matches that of the predatory conqueror opposed to the sedentary colonizer.

From the short description I have given of it it has become clear that the power of the jaguar-monster has a strong sexual component. This motif finds a close parallel in several Kogi myths according to which the jaguar-monsters used to assault women, sometimes under the guise of a shaman pretending to effect a cure. A Kogi tale tells of a girl who lived with her family in a region formerly inhabited by Jaguar-People. One day the girl was attacked by a jaguar and bitten in the breast.

The girl began to growl like a jaguar, and died shortly after and was buried. During the night the jaguar returned and devoured the corpse. The association or, rather, identification of the jaguar with thunder is a point of interest here. In the sixteenth century the temple of the great thunder deity Dabeiba, in northwestern Colombia, had a jaguar for a guardian and a loud thunderclap was taken as a sign that the deity was angry Vadillo Among the Kogi Indians the jaguarspirits are often identified with thunder, lightning, and rain and, again, appear as the supernatural guardians of ceremonial sites.

Thunder and lightning appear in shamanistic visions among the Tunebo Indians Rocherau Michael Coe 85 emphasizes the childlike aspect of many sculptures and Covarrubias ; has suggested that these personifications were essentially rain spirits and the prototypes of the later rain gods of Mesoamerica.

On the other hand, these ferocious little jaguar-babies still survive in the folklore of the coast of Veracruz under the name of chaneques, small dwarfed beings who live in cascades and who, besides being rain-spirits, are said to persecute women Covarrubias They too persecute women, sometimes appearing to them in sexual fantasies and causing them to waste away if not treated by a shaman.

The Mexican chaneques are also the supernatural masters of game animals and fish, and here a new parallel with Colombian Indian cultures arises. Among the Tukano tribes the Master of Animals is imagined as a red dwarf who dwells in caves or at the bottom of deep pools; he is closely associated with the jaguar, assaults women sexually, and watches over the fertility and increase of the animal world.

It is from him that the shaman must obtain permission for the hunters and fishermen to kill game Reichel-Dolmatoff 58ff. As we can see, jaguars, voracious little beings, and thunder combine with rain, fertility, and sexual aggression into a complex pattern of inter-related beliefs which, as we now can recognize quite clearly, constitute the principal sphere of action of most shamanistic practices.

The close association between shamanism and jaguar-spirits is too well known to need to be emphasized here, and I can turn therefore to the local Colombian scene. Among most Colombian Indians the basic idea, stated briefly, is that the shaman can turn into a jaguar at will, using the form of this animal as a disguise, sometimes in order to achieve benefit ends, sometimes to threaten and to kill.

Eventually, after death, the shaman turns permanently into a jaguar and can manifest himself in this form to the living, again in a benevolent or malefic way, as the case may be. According to the Spanish chroniclers, feline representations in Colombia were frequently associated with ceremonial sites and shamanistic practices. Among the many Indian tribes which survive in Colombia, the jaguar continues to occupy this important position in myth and ritual.

Among the Kogi Reichel-Dolmatoff passim there are many traditions which speak of different jaguar personifications, and of all these beings it is said that they were great shamans who were able to change freely from human to animal form and back again, and who established rituals, fought wars, and exercised their dominion all over the mountains.

The Kogi still use elaborately carved wooden masks representing the jaguar-monster, and during certain dances their songs are addressed to this animal Preuss Fig. The rain forests of the Colombian northwest Amazon constitute another immense area where this feline plays a central role in tribal beliefs Preuss ; Whiffen Among the Tukano tribes, both their eastern and western sections Reichel-Dolmatoff 99ff. Th e person of the shaman contains many aspects of sexual energy which are partly derived from, partly reflected upon, the spirit-beings and material objects which are his helpers and tools.

Among practically all Tukanoan and Witotan tribes the shaman and the jaguar are designated by one single term, a name derived from the word for cohabitation Reichel-Dolmatoff The man and the beast are both conceived as progenitors and procreators, as possessing great sexual energy, the former representing society, the latter nature. The jaguar, on the other hand, expresses this vital energy in nature.

According to the Tukano Indians, his roar is the roar of thunder which announces the fertilizing rains; his color is the bright color of the East, the rising sun, the seminal color of creation and growth. The jaguar is the guardian of the sib house which is imagined as a great protective womb over which he dominates with his fertilizing power. Thousands of kilometers away, in the mountains of the Caribbean coast, the Kogi Indians of the Sierra Nevada express beliefs which are similar in detail to those of the rain-forest tribes of the Amazon Reichel-Dolmatoff Among all these Indians, then, the jaguar is essentially a symbol of procreative power but as such-it must be pointed out here-he is ambivalent, the male sexual energy easily becoming a destructive agent, profoundly affecting the fine equilibrium of kinship and social relations at large.

It is this ambivalent force the shaman has to master and here seems to lie the key to the close relationship between the man and the beast, between the representative of a social order and the spontaneous life force he sees embodied in the powerful carnivore. It is important to emphasize here the role the shaman plays as an agent of social control; even in his capacity as a curer he continues to fulfill this role because among many Indians a state of disease is often interpreted as being caused by magical sexual contamination.

I must turn now briefly to another, most important aspect of shamanistic practices connected with jaguar imagery.

Most, if not all, Colombian Indian religions were based upon or, at least, closely related to, the interpretation of drug-induced hallucinations, and these altered states of consciousness provided an important mechanism for individual and collective supernatural experience.

The use of hallucinogenic drugs derived from certain plants was, and still is, very widespread among these Indians, and is already mentioned in the earliest Spanish sources Aguado , I: The principal drugs are concoctions of different species of Banisteriopsis and Datura and, above all, narcotic snuffs prepared from Anadenanthera peregrina or Virola.

The important fact is that in the preparation of these drugs and in the hallucinations produced by them, the imagery of the jaguar plays a major role. In the second place, in the preparation of these drugs the jaguar image is of importance. The Guahibo keep the narcotic snuff in a tubular jaguar bone, and the shaman wears a crown of jaguar claws and a cover of jaguar skin when he takes this drug Reichel-Dolmatoff The snuff tablets of the ancient Chibcha are often adorned with jaguar representations.

It is his task to bridge the ambivalence of the jaguar image which to some might appear as a threatening and horrifying monster, to others as tame and subservient. In those cultures on which there exists a body of detailed information, it seems that the psychological projection of the jaguar is closely connected to the problems of incest and exogamy which underlie the social structure, and in the solution of which the controlled use of hallucinogenic drugs, under the guidance of the shaman, is an all-important mechanism.

The psychoactive stimulus which triggers off this imagery might have been of a different nature in other cultural areas, but in the case of Colombia I am inclined to believe that hallucinogenic drugs provided this mechanism and exercised a strong influence upon many aboriginal artistic expressions.

The feline rather represents an energetic principle, the natural life force which, on a social level, has to be controlled if a moral order is to be preserved. II, pp. I, no. Unpublished manuscript X, pp.

Smithsonian Institution, Washington. Botanical Museum Leaflets, Harvard University, vol. I, pp. Effron, ed. Public Health Service Publication No. In what way besides fanged canine teeth is the jaguar aspect imparted to these anthropomorphic felines?

Are there any pelt markings or claws? Of course, there are monkeys with enormous canines. The basic concept is one of eating and devouring. It is not exactly a matter of what kind of animal it is, but what is important is the mouth and fangs, the idea of eating and devouring, or rather, the concept of incorporation, of finding somehow the expression of something that devours, that kills, that incorporates.

In the human-feline statues we only get the teeth. Once in a while we have something more naturalistic. Is the jaguar being transformed into another type of animal?

Is there any consistency in the alter-ego images on top? Those alter-ego images are, of course, tremendously elaborated in the Central Andes and Mesoamerica. There it is not really an exogamic principle, but a more generalized type of principle involving the transition from nature to man—that 66 is, the jaguar eating raw meat versus man eating cooked meat.

The jaguar is very often used as a symbol of the nature principle and man of the culture principle. Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff monkey. My only point is that they were not restricted in feline symbolism to animals that we classify as part of the feline family. It seems to me in my work with these people that they often know a good deal more about nature and zoology than we do, and are capable of telling creatures and plants apart that we would classify as the same.

Some years ago a Smithsonian-National Geographic scientist in Australia had the experience of wrongly classifying a fish while being watched by an Australian aborigine who pointed out to him that there was a very minute difference on the interior of the fish which in fact made this a different species. I think these people know a great deal more about what animals are and what they are not than we do. However, in defense of what you say, I might suggest that the people in the Tropical Forest might group certain animals that have jaguar characteristics, like fangs.

Why, for example, is the bat so important? The bat is an animal of night and of caves, it is the only animal that nurtures its young from two breasts like a human, it has fangs like a jaguar, it has the characteristics of a bird, so it incorporates a great many concepts like this.

But I think they knew that a bat was a flying mammal and not a bird, not a jaguar, not a man. As you say, they could see aspects. If he knows what it is, you may not know what he calls it specifically and taxonomically.

Have you any opinion on this? I think the that is capable of singing the beautiful sharelationships are much more specific to the manic chants and a heart of a jaguar; his enCentral Andes than they are to Mesoamerica. SAWYER : In the personifications that were Mexico City of a gigantic jaguar seated in a shown, you have a very close stylistic relation- human pose, dandling a little human figure on ship to the Huaylas stone sculpture. Is this largely mod- entrails are dangling out, and whose neck is torn open as well, but who shows no fear.

The ern ethnology or is it sixteenth-century jaguar is maybe four or five times the size of texts? I think this must be a representaDR. R OSE: Do you have any archaeological jaguar. So you get this on the one hand in a evidence for the use of psychoactive drugs?

We have some of stone Maya. Then, we have representations man and this so-called Giant Jaguar in the of lime vessels for chewing coca-this, of jaguar areas in South America? In a cave in course, is quite frequent. Idaho, bones of the Giant Jaguar and of huDR. It is not entirely clear, but it appears that these jaguar bones are in the same level with the human association. I was wondering whether there was any specific, absolutely proven association in addition to this.

Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff jaguar dominant over a human figure, which occurs in a number of early cultures. The only royal crown. Then, tremendous enlargement of nature. This is not only true of those areas inhabited by the great cats, but equally true of areas where large felines do not exist or have long been extinct. Others have generalized the Chavin feline motif to such an extent that the whole picture has become clouded and confused.

Furthermore feline attributes appear to be totally lacking. Two pieces will fit very nicely together, and yet it will be difficult to find the third piece that joins the first two. I hope that in this paper I will be able to show how a few more pieces fit into this vast and complicated puzzle. I shall call these felines per se. In this context the feline per se appears, as far as I know, only in profile.

The following details are particularly noteworthy: 1. I Monolithfrom Cerro 5. It is also interesting to note that the snakes bear different pelage markings of the circle-and-dot variety in addition to feline crossed fangs in their mouths. Benson — was an art historian known for her extensive contributions to the study of Pre-Columbian art, in particular that of Mesoamerica and the Andes. A former Andrew S. The three volumes in this set, all edited by Benson, were first published in the early s and are based on conferences held at Dumbarton Oaks.

All are seminal works in Pre-Columbian studies. Skip to main content. Search form Search this site. Login Cart. The Cult of the Feline.

Publication date: November ISBN: Rules, cards, and tiles:. The Lady and the Tiger. The Lady and the Tiger is five games in one:. Doors : A 2-player bluffing game by Peter C. Hoard : A solo game by Ken Maher. Labyrinth : A 2-player maze game by Philip Tootill. Traps : A player bluffing game by JR Honeycutt. Rules Translated :. Doors Italian. Favor Italian. Hoard Italian. Traps Italian. Labyrinth Italian. Suitable for ages 10 and up, it plays in minutes.

Guest Cards - English. Accusation Cards - English. Card Backs. Cards - Italian. Rules - English. Reference Card - English.