Paleoindian Were-Jaguar Core? Part II
Anthropomorphic jaguar on a Mayan vessel.
“Jaguar-men are were-jaguars, who fight and destroy their human and spiritual adversaries on earth and in the sky. The Catío picture them as personages with a human body and feline head and claws. Machigenga shamans . . . turn into jaguar aggressors to pursue and kill humans. Jaguar shamans of the Mojo are men who have been wounded by jaguars . . . Campa shamans fight great supernatural battles and turn into jaguars after they die. . . . Were-jaguars cannibalize their enemies, abduct them into slavery and rape their women.”
― Johannes Wilbert
Anthropomorphic jaguar of the La Tolita culture.
Comparing were-jaguarism among the Baniwa, Bororo, and Cubeo.
“In ancient times there was a pajé called Huiti wanakale who looked for pajés’ powers. He obtained much power but began to lose control and to kill people. He transformed into an enormous black jaguar. After he had killed people from other families, he went on to kill his wife’s father and mother and then his wife and children. As he became more and more of a menace, his kin got together, ambushed, and killed him. It was Huiti wanakale himself who recommended that they kill him. He instructed them to burn his body, but instead they simply cut off his head and threw it into the river. The head floated downriver still with its brains and the knowledge of how to cause all sicknesses but also how to cure them. When the head reached a place a bit above Juí uitera (on the Içana River), the Guahibo sorcerers called Dzauinaikada, got the head, took out the brains, and got all the sorcerers’ powers in them, thus learning all sorts of evil things. After the Guahibo had taken out his brains, the head continued on downriver. In that time the Guahibo sorcerers were of a people called Padali. (Note: Koch-Grünberg’s informant called them Pidzári.) They were affines of the Baniwa of the Aiary River. After they had learned all these things, they began to transform into jaguars, forest spirits, and other animals; they threw sickness-giving spirit darts onto people and ate people.”
“This story explains the dangerous potential that pariká has to transform a pajé into a killer black jaguar.”
“The story demonstrates how it is possible to lose control over the effects of pariká and the pajé then becomes a menace to society. It is as though the predatory "jaguar" power that pariká unleashes can potentially dominate one's thoughts entirely. By way of comparison, it is said that any sorcerer may likewise reach a point in his experience when "his only thought is to kill" (manhekada lima), that is, the repeated experience of practicing sorcery turns the practitioner permanently into a sorcerer, transforming his body and soul into a predator.”
“The pariká first has to be "blessed" through protective chants by the master shaman, for without that blessing, the apprentices could go mad, as the story of the first pajés recounts. As elsewhere in South American shamanism, the Baniwa tell stories of humans who used "unblessed" pariká and transformed into killer jaguars who roamed the forest at night, attacking and devouring people. They were eventually trapped, killed, and thrown into the river, but at each village where the bodies passed, the Baniwa took part of their pelts and brains and became jaguar shamans. When pariká was first obtained in the first world, the tapir stole it from its rightful owner, Nhiãperikuli, the creator deity. The tapir began passing around pariká before it had been "blessed." Its potential to transform a person into a dangerous predator had not yet been neutralized, and so the tapir became a voracious jaguar. He was quickly subdued, however, and ownership of the powerful substance was restored to Nhiãperikuli. There is thus a deep link between pariká and jaguar transformation which demands further explanation.”
― Robin M. Wright
“...many sorts of bope, including the lowest variety known as maereboe, are not so tangibly personified. They invisibly inhabit the lower heavens and this earth, and they attend all human behavior with great interest. In this they contrast with the aroe, who dwell in the remote underworld and rarely venture from it and who ignore most human activity. But the Bororo are daily made aware of the bope’s presence about them, through the workings of the physical universe, unusual natural events ("omens"), and other less tangible ways.”
“Some shamans are thought to transform themselves through the bope's powers into jaguars and alligators so as to feed on bope ure. Likewise, the bope enable an evil shaman to "eat up" innocent people.”
“Though all the shamans I talked to, including the four resident at Korugedu Paru, categorically denied that they ever metamorphosed into animals, other Bororo smiled knowingly at such denials. In popular belief, every mature shaman can, through the good offices of his familiar, change himself into a jaguar, alligator, or rattlesnake whenever he chooses, both in dreams and while in trance. Witch-shamans often employ such natural agencies to strike down their victims, which is one reason why my shaman-informants were so vehement in their public denials of this power.”
“The Bororo opinion that certain natural species "are" bope, and that other species "are" aroe is a subtle and complex epistemological position. As noted earlier, bope and aroe are cosmological principles on the order of the classical Chinese concepts of yin and yang. As such they are manifested in all aspects of reality, since all things have a double aspect, being at once process (bope) and form (aroe), But at certain points in the natural world the boundary between perceptual and transcendent realities becomes weak or semi-permeable. At these points, whether living beings or physical processes, the antithetical modalities break through to manifest some of the attributes which define their powers.
“The moral ambiguity of shamans is perhaps most intensely mirrored in the ambiguity surrounding the status of their personal aroe, their "souls." In terms of categorical dogma, as outlined in Chapter 4, all bope have an aroe in that, despite all their amorphousness and inclination to metamorphoses, each in its typological variety does have a nominal form and so an aroe, complete with social affiliation. Such is also true of the living shaman, who obviously possesses a distinctive fleshy envelope, a name (the essence of human aroe-ness), and a social persona expressed in the formal obligations and rights of the clan aroe system. He is anything but that near total manifestation of bopeness in the world that a vulture represents, not even that partial refraction which is an omen. The one shaman whom I could persuade to discuss the issue declared that he "was" a bope, as a bope "was" a jaguar, implying his aroe only temporarily became a bope. (A nonshaman, hearing this, said with contempt, "an alligator maybe.") This appears a typical Bororo sophistry, resting on the argument that if bope can have aroe, why could not a particular aroe become a bope?”
“The Bororo do not think that any particular vulture or small hawk or any other natural "sort" of bope incarnates these spirits, no more than they flee all contact with rain as itself a bope. They deny that the bope transform themselves into the species which manifest the essential characteristics of their own nature: there would be no point in simply becoming oneself, and in an attenuated form at that. Rather, all Bororo are sure that when the bope wish to participate actively in the world of physical forms they either metamorphose into or take possession of either the body of a man or that of a jaguar, a puma, or a rattlesnake. Their motive for doing so is simple: in those forms they may either enjoy sexuality or kill and eat their favorite foods, those otherwise obtained only through the intervention of man.”
“Therefore, if the creatures called Themselves bope (Table 6:1) are a kind of window in the cosmological wall between spirit and reality, the animals which the bope utilize to accomplish their gourmand desires are in a sense doors between these separate dimensions of being. The fact that bope are most often supposed to take the form of jaguars for their interventions in the world is especially important, for later material will show that this species is itself a crucial synthesis of bope and aroe attributes, and as such the basic zoological metaphor for human beings. It should be remembered that bope also pass directly into human bodies to enjoy food and sex.”
“It is simply because the bope wish to eat their foods that they cause, or allow, the shaman these transformations. The shaman may also assume these forms in dreams in order to protect the village, especially against bad shamans, and to travel to other villages where he may help the bope-souls of local shamans to cure sick people there. Some say that it is as these animals, especially the jaguar, that the shaman travels into the future. Others believe that the shaman of the bope sometimes changes himself into an alligator, or a jaguar, in order to drive fish and game to the hunters. Of course, all bope are capable of such transformations, although most informants were uncertain about whether these actually metamorphosed or simply entered an existing animal.”
― Jon Christopher Crocker
“As a result of these shamanistic battles some strong yavís emerge with extraordinary reputations for power and aggressiveness. The yaví is the single truly aggressive figure among the Cubeo. The ordinary pariékokü is not. The fact of being called "jaguar" puts the shaman beyond the human pale and allows him scope for unbridled ferocity. The benevolent acts of the yaví, his skill as a curer, his ability to find things, and inexplicably his ability to ripen fruits — the subject of ancestral rites — weigh relatively little against his reputation as a "killer." The relationship between the yaví and the jaguar never became fully clear to me, perhaps because my information came only from laymen. No yaví was willing to talk to me about his work. Some informants said flatly that every jaguar was a yaví or a dog of a yaví, or a jaguar into which a yaví's soul has entered. When a yaví dies his ghost spirit (dekókü) becomes a jaguar. According to this view, the jaguar is feared because he is not an animal but a fiercely predatory man. Other informants explained that there are both ordinary jaguars and jaguars who are yavís. Both views agreed on the point that the fierceness of the jaguar is of human origin. Those who believed in ordinary jaguars said those were the kind that might run from a man. The yaví is ordinarily in human form and assumes the jaguar form by putting on a jaguar skin. One man said that it is not the man inside but the jaguar skin that eats the victim. There is also the view that it is the umé of the yaví that assumes a jaguar form and prowls about at night devouring people. One yaví, it is said, had his daughter pick the bits of human flesh from his teeth with the fang of a serpent. This young woman would steal from the manioc gardens. The woman caught her at it and beat her. The next night the umé of her father ate them all. Another feature of the yavís is that they are never solitary. They travel in packs and they form a college for the training of recruits. The story is told of an attack on a house at dawn by pwányavíwa (jaguar people) who ate up all the people but one man who had hidden on a rafter. Having eaten, the jaguars took off their skins and went outside to fetch water. The man jumped down and threw all the skins into the fire. When the jaguars returned they rushed to save the burning skins. Those that succeeded left the house as jaguars and those that did not had to leave as humans.”
“The shaman, whether yaví or pariékokü, chooses his calling. It does not choose him. There is nothing to suggest that the Cubeo shaman is an unstable personality in the way in which Siberian and many North American Indian shamans are. That is to say, among the Cubeo there is neither trance nor other form of "hysterical" behavior. The yaví, who cultivates the reputation of himself as a jaguar, is seemingly an aggressive antisocial type, in marked contrast to the favored Cubeo personality. I heard of only one woman who had become a shaman, and she was a transvestite who made such a nuisance of herself bothering women that the shamans who had prepared her stripped her of her powers. Any youth may become a shaman if he is accepted by the school of shamans, submits to the rigors of the novitiate, and passes an examination. As a young man he will not be a yaví. He becomes more malevolent and more dangerous with age. As an elder he finally acquires the power to appear as a jaguar.”
“The jaguar of the payé, as my informants persistently reminded me, is not of this world. He is a spirit being, not the life-spirit of an animal, but a category that does not have an actual animal existence. In our terms, it would be a representation of jaguarness. This shamanic yaví combines those features of an animal that stand for its metaphoric qualities, such as the thundering voice, the all around versatility as a predator, the capacity to kill with one qick bound, and aggressive fierceness. Two principle types of jaguar are involved, the tawny-hided and spotted, and the black. The latter, called the "Fierce One," is Master of the Jaguar. Cubeo commonly describe jaguars as "man-eaters," even as they also concede that the true animal is not particularly dangerous. Nevertheless, older people recall examples of jaguar attacks, though many say that such jaguars are not real animals but payés in animal guise. Myth depicts a race of jaguars which, in concert with the demonic abúhuwa, devoured human offspring at the time when people were just beginning to be born, and they catastrophically undermined the human capacity to establish itself. Mankind was saved by a succession of universal floods and fires that decimated both jaguars and abúhuwa. In shamanic doctrine, "jaguarness" combines the qualities of strength and fierceness with catastrophic man eating, specifically, the devouring of children.”
― Irving Goldman
Paleoindian were-jaguar core or platonic were-jaguar core?
“Jaguar-men are were-jaguars, who fight and destroy their human and spiritual adversaries on earth and in the sky. The Catío picture them as personages with a human body and feline head and claws. Machigenga shamans . . . turn into jaguar aggressors to pursue and kill humans. Jaguar shamans of the Mojo are men who have been wounded by jaguars . . . Campa shamans fight great supernatural battles and turn into jaguars after they die. . . . Were-jaguars cannibalize their enemies, abduct them into slavery and rape their women.”
― Johannes Wilbert
“The jaguar of the hallucinatory sphere, the jaguar-monster of Tukano tales, is a man’s alter ego, now roaming free and untrammeled, and acting out his deepest desires and fears.”
― Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff
Continuing and going deeper into the theme of Amazonian were-jaguars and fake jaguars.Comparing were-jaguarism among the Baniwa, Bororo, and Cubeo.
“In ancient times there was a pajé called Huiti wanakale who looked for pajés’ powers. He obtained much power but began to lose control and to kill people. He transformed into an enormous black jaguar. After he had killed people from other families, he went on to kill his wife’s father and mother and then his wife and children. As he became more and more of a menace, his kin got together, ambushed, and killed him. It was Huiti wanakale himself who recommended that they kill him. He instructed them to burn his body, but instead they simply cut off his head and threw it into the river. The head floated downriver still with its brains and the knowledge of how to cause all sicknesses but also how to cure them. When the head reached a place a bit above Juí uitera (on the Içana River), the Guahibo sorcerers called Dzauinaikada, got the head, took out the brains, and got all the sorcerers’ powers in them, thus learning all sorts of evil things. After the Guahibo had taken out his brains, the head continued on downriver. In that time the Guahibo sorcerers were of a people called Padali. (Note: Koch-Grünberg’s informant called them Pidzári.) They were affines of the Baniwa of the Aiary River. After they had learned all these things, they began to transform into jaguars, forest spirits, and other animals; they threw sickness-giving spirit darts onto people and ate people.”
“This story explains the dangerous potential that pariká has to transform a pajé into a killer black jaguar.”
“The story demonstrates how it is possible to lose control over the effects of pariká and the pajé then becomes a menace to society. It is as though the predatory "jaguar" power that pariká unleashes can potentially dominate one's thoughts entirely. By way of comparison, it is said that any sorcerer may likewise reach a point in his experience when "his only thought is to kill" (manhekada lima), that is, the repeated experience of practicing sorcery turns the practitioner permanently into a sorcerer, transforming his body and soul into a predator.”
“The pariká first has to be "blessed" through protective chants by the master shaman, for without that blessing, the apprentices could go mad, as the story of the first pajés recounts. As elsewhere in South American shamanism, the Baniwa tell stories of humans who used "unblessed" pariká and transformed into killer jaguars who roamed the forest at night, attacking and devouring people. They were eventually trapped, killed, and thrown into the river, but at each village where the bodies passed, the Baniwa took part of their pelts and brains and became jaguar shamans. When pariká was first obtained in the first world, the tapir stole it from its rightful owner, Nhiãperikuli, the creator deity. The tapir began passing around pariká before it had been "blessed." Its potential to transform a person into a dangerous predator had not yet been neutralized, and so the tapir became a voracious jaguar. He was quickly subdued, however, and ownership of the powerful substance was restored to Nhiãperikuli. There is thus a deep link between pariká and jaguar transformation which demands further explanation.”
― Robin M. Wright
“...many sorts of bope, including the lowest variety known as maereboe, are not so tangibly personified. They invisibly inhabit the lower heavens and this earth, and they attend all human behavior with great interest. In this they contrast with the aroe, who dwell in the remote underworld and rarely venture from it and who ignore most human activity. But the Bororo are daily made aware of the bope’s presence about them, through the workings of the physical universe, unusual natural events ("omens"), and other less tangible ways.”
“Some shamans are thought to transform themselves through the bope's powers into jaguars and alligators so as to feed on bope ure. Likewise, the bope enable an evil shaman to "eat up" innocent people.”
“Though all the shamans I talked to, including the four resident at Korugedu Paru, categorically denied that they ever metamorphosed into animals, other Bororo smiled knowingly at such denials. In popular belief, every mature shaman can, through the good offices of his familiar, change himself into a jaguar, alligator, or rattlesnake whenever he chooses, both in dreams and while in trance. Witch-shamans often employ such natural agencies to strike down their victims, which is one reason why my shaman-informants were so vehement in their public denials of this power.”
“The Bororo opinion that certain natural species "are" bope, and that other species "are" aroe is a subtle and complex epistemological position. As noted earlier, bope and aroe are cosmological principles on the order of the classical Chinese concepts of yin and yang. As such they are manifested in all aspects of reality, since all things have a double aspect, being at once process (bope) and form (aroe), But at certain points in the natural world the boundary between perceptual and transcendent realities becomes weak or semi-permeable. At these points, whether living beings or physical processes, the antithetical modalities break through to manifest some of the attributes which define their powers.
“The moral ambiguity of shamans is perhaps most intensely mirrored in the ambiguity surrounding the status of their personal aroe, their "souls." In terms of categorical dogma, as outlined in Chapter 4, all bope have an aroe in that, despite all their amorphousness and inclination to metamorphoses, each in its typological variety does have a nominal form and so an aroe, complete with social affiliation. Such is also true of the living shaman, who obviously possesses a distinctive fleshy envelope, a name (the essence of human aroe-ness), and a social persona expressed in the formal obligations and rights of the clan aroe system. He is anything but that near total manifestation of bopeness in the world that a vulture represents, not even that partial refraction which is an omen. The one shaman whom I could persuade to discuss the issue declared that he "was" a bope, as a bope "was" a jaguar, implying his aroe only temporarily became a bope. (A nonshaman, hearing this, said with contempt, "an alligator maybe.") This appears a typical Bororo sophistry, resting on the argument that if bope can have aroe, why could not a particular aroe become a bope?”
“The Bororo do not think that any particular vulture or small hawk or any other natural "sort" of bope incarnates these spirits, no more than they flee all contact with rain as itself a bope. They deny that the bope transform themselves into the species which manifest the essential characteristics of their own nature: there would be no point in simply becoming oneself, and in an attenuated form at that. Rather, all Bororo are sure that when the bope wish to participate actively in the world of physical forms they either metamorphose into or take possession of either the body of a man or that of a jaguar, a puma, or a rattlesnake. Their motive for doing so is simple: in those forms they may either enjoy sexuality or kill and eat their favorite foods, those otherwise obtained only through the intervention of man.”
“Therefore, if the creatures called Themselves bope (Table 6:1) are a kind of window in the cosmological wall between spirit and reality, the animals which the bope utilize to accomplish their gourmand desires are in a sense doors between these separate dimensions of being. The fact that bope are most often supposed to take the form of jaguars for their interventions in the world is especially important, for later material will show that this species is itself a crucial synthesis of bope and aroe attributes, and as such the basic zoological metaphor for human beings. It should be remembered that bope also pass directly into human bodies to enjoy food and sex.”
“It is simply because the bope wish to eat their foods that they cause, or allow, the shaman these transformations. The shaman may also assume these forms in dreams in order to protect the village, especially against bad shamans, and to travel to other villages where he may help the bope-souls of local shamans to cure sick people there. Some say that it is as these animals, especially the jaguar, that the shaman travels into the future. Others believe that the shaman of the bope sometimes changes himself into an alligator, or a jaguar, in order to drive fish and game to the hunters. Of course, all bope are capable of such transformations, although most informants were uncertain about whether these actually metamorphosed or simply entered an existing animal.”
― Jon Christopher Crocker
“As a result of these shamanistic battles some strong yavís emerge with extraordinary reputations for power and aggressiveness. The yaví is the single truly aggressive figure among the Cubeo. The ordinary pariékokü is not. The fact of being called "jaguar" puts the shaman beyond the human pale and allows him scope for unbridled ferocity. The benevolent acts of the yaví, his skill as a curer, his ability to find things, and inexplicably his ability to ripen fruits — the subject of ancestral rites — weigh relatively little against his reputation as a "killer." The relationship between the yaví and the jaguar never became fully clear to me, perhaps because my information came only from laymen. No yaví was willing to talk to me about his work. Some informants said flatly that every jaguar was a yaví or a dog of a yaví, or a jaguar into which a yaví's soul has entered. When a yaví dies his ghost spirit (dekókü) becomes a jaguar. According to this view, the jaguar is feared because he is not an animal but a fiercely predatory man. Other informants explained that there are both ordinary jaguars and jaguars who are yavís. Both views agreed on the point that the fierceness of the jaguar is of human origin. Those who believed in ordinary jaguars said those were the kind that might run from a man. The yaví is ordinarily in human form and assumes the jaguar form by putting on a jaguar skin. One man said that it is not the man inside but the jaguar skin that eats the victim. There is also the view that it is the umé of the yaví that assumes a jaguar form and prowls about at night devouring people. One yaví, it is said, had his daughter pick the bits of human flesh from his teeth with the fang of a serpent. This young woman would steal from the manioc gardens. The woman caught her at it and beat her. The next night the umé of her father ate them all. Another feature of the yavís is that they are never solitary. They travel in packs and they form a college for the training of recruits. The story is told of an attack on a house at dawn by pwányavíwa (jaguar people) who ate up all the people but one man who had hidden on a rafter. Having eaten, the jaguars took off their skins and went outside to fetch water. The man jumped down and threw all the skins into the fire. When the jaguars returned they rushed to save the burning skins. Those that succeeded left the house as jaguars and those that did not had to leave as humans.”
“The shaman, whether yaví or pariékokü, chooses his calling. It does not choose him. There is nothing to suggest that the Cubeo shaman is an unstable personality in the way in which Siberian and many North American Indian shamans are. That is to say, among the Cubeo there is neither trance nor other form of "hysterical" behavior. The yaví, who cultivates the reputation of himself as a jaguar, is seemingly an aggressive antisocial type, in marked contrast to the favored Cubeo personality. I heard of only one woman who had become a shaman, and she was a transvestite who made such a nuisance of herself bothering women that the shamans who had prepared her stripped her of her powers. Any youth may become a shaman if he is accepted by the school of shamans, submits to the rigors of the novitiate, and passes an examination. As a young man he will not be a yaví. He becomes more malevolent and more dangerous with age. As an elder he finally acquires the power to appear as a jaguar.”
“The jaguar of the payé, as my informants persistently reminded me, is not of this world. He is a spirit being, not the life-spirit of an animal, but a category that does not have an actual animal existence. In our terms, it would be a representation of jaguarness. This shamanic yaví combines those features of an animal that stand for its metaphoric qualities, such as the thundering voice, the all around versatility as a predator, the capacity to kill with one qick bound, and aggressive fierceness. Two principle types of jaguar are involved, the tawny-hided and spotted, and the black. The latter, called the "Fierce One," is Master of the Jaguar. Cubeo commonly describe jaguars as "man-eaters," even as they also concede that the true animal is not particularly dangerous. Nevertheless, older people recall examples of jaguar attacks, though many say that such jaguars are not real animals but payés in animal guise. Myth depicts a race of jaguars which, in concert with the demonic abúhuwa, devoured human offspring at the time when people were just beginning to be born, and they catastrophically undermined the human capacity to establish itself. Mankind was saved by a succession of universal floods and fires that decimated both jaguars and abúhuwa. In shamanic doctrine, "jaguarness" combines the qualities of strength and fierceness with catastrophic man eating, specifically, the devouring of children.”
― Irving Goldman
Paleoindian were-jaguar core or platonic were-jaguar core?
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