by Peter Watson
The feline is ubiquitous in Mochica art (AD 100–AD 800), sometimes as the ocelot or puma, but most often as the jaguar. On pots a snarling jaguar is frequently shown standing behind a human with its paws resting on the human’s shoulder. Elizabeth Benson says such pots embody two main themes – those depicting prisoners of war and those associated with rituals surrounding the important coca leaf.15 ‘A link between the narcotic coca leaf and the feline is clearly hinted at by a beautiful golden coca-bag in the shape of a jaguar.’16 Dried leaves were kept inside, to be used by the shaman or priests in their rituals.
The Mochica were very militaristic and brought large numbers of captured prisoners back to their capitals. The pottery shows long lines of victims tied together by ropes around their necks, and distinctive hairstyles marking them out as prisoners of war. On one beautifully painted pot, a large feline is shown seated in front of a small man, who is typically blind in one eye and has his hands tied behind his back – clearly a captive. The feline is shown as he is about to tear at the man’s throat, from which blood appears to be trickling.17
The dominant feline in the Andes was the puma (though the jaguar may have been regarded as the father or master of all cats). Puma symbolism was associated with royalty and with militarism – the drums of the troops were played by men dressed in puma skins and there are those archaeologists who believe that the entire Inca state was conceived in the form of a giant puma that bestrode the Andes. War leaders wore puma skins too and dedicated their victories to the animal. Pumas were kept for ritual purposes and great efforts made to tame them. In the Inca province of Pumallacta, pumas were worshipped and, according to some sources, sacrifices of human hearts were made to the feline spirit. Even today puma masks are worn in local fĕtes.18
Among the classic Maya (AD 300–900), the jaguar was a recurring motif, often portrayed as a deity, the god of the seventh day, Akbal, which means ‘night’. In Mayan art a rolled-up jaguar skin symbolises the starry night sky and the animal is in general associated with night, dark places, the underworld, danger. But it was also associated with rulership – jaguar pelts were draped over royal thrones, and the thrones themselves could be in the form of jaguars. Nobles wore jaguar skins, warriors and nobles wore jaguar helmets, and carried weapons made of jaguar bones. Luxury gloves were made of jaguar paws.19
Mainly jaguar symbolism among the Maya occurred in contexts of warfare, fertility and sacrifice. Knives used in sacrifice and formed of three obsidian blades are intended, according to some sources, to represent the marks made by jaguar claws; and the heart sacrifice that lay at the centre of Maya ritual reached its climax when the victims’ bodies were eaten by jaguars.20 At the site of Chichén Itźá, in northern Yucatán, there are four jaguar thrones, the most famous of which is the ‘Red Jaguar’ throne, discovered inside the great temple of the Feathered Serpent. This throne is in the form of a life-sized jaguar, brilliant red, with 73 jade discs imitating the rosette pattern on the skin of the real animal. There was, too, a widespread practice of using jaguar names as identifying titles – Shield-Jaguar, Bird-Jaguar, Bat-Jaguar, Knotted-Eye-Jaguar and many, many more.
In the central plaza of Chichén Itźá, there is a platform of the jaguars and eagles, with superbly carved jaguars eating human hearts. Warriors are shown dressed in jaguar skins, and flanked by human skulls. The famous Feathered Serpent god may also conceal jaguar features. According to Joyce Marcus, an expert on Mayan writing, four classic Mayan cities – Yaxchilán, Palenque, Tikal and Calakmul – organised themselves into a military alliance under the sign of the jaguar and in emulation of its aggressive powers.21
This association was even more marked among the Aztecs. (Nicholas Saunders describes the jaguar presence as ‘ominous’.) The Aztecs inherited some of their more militaristic practices from the Toltecs, famous today for their reconstructed temple-pyramid of Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent god, around which, originally, a series of jaguars or pumas are seen marching. Alternating rows show eagles crouching and also eating human hearts. There were two elite Toltec warrior castes, one dedicated to the jaguar, the other to the eagle, a practice that was repeated among the Aztecs.22
At their great mountain-top temple of Malinalco, west of Tenochtitlán, which may have been dedicated to the two warriors castes, great crouching monumental jaguars line the great stairway which leads to the inner sanctum, dominated by a stone bench with eagles and jaguars carved into it. At the Great Aztec temple at Tenochtitlán itself, one side has a subterranean temple dedicated to eagle warriors (shown marching to the sun) and the expectation is that the other side, not yet excavated, will show jaguar warriors in an equivalent arrangement.23 This possibility is indirectly supported by the fact that, during the excavations at the Templo Mayor, a complete skeleton of a jaguar was found with, between its fangs, a sacred green stone. In the Aztec idea of the cyclical nature of time, with the sun and eclipses separating the cycles, the eclipses are sometimes described as blackened skies with ‘flesh-tearing jaguars’ descending from the clouds.24 As Nicholas Saunders puts it, ‘[This] affords us a brief glimpse into the complex beliefs of the Aztecs, in which jaguars, jade, rain and fertility were all intimately associated. The practice of auto-sacrifice, during which the people would pierce their own skin to collect blood as a ritual offering to their gods, was often accomplished with “spines” or lancets made of jade.’25 There were regular ceremonies, some called Tlacaxipehualiztli, or ‘the skinning of men’, in which inebriated captives were forced to defend themselves with a feathered stick against jaguar-knights armed with a wooden sword inset with obsidian blades. The obsidian blades, again, were a metaphor for jaguar teeth. Afterwards, when blood had been shed, the captives were sacrificed, with their hearts cut out.
Finally, jaguar symbolism was intimately associated with the identity of the Aztec supreme deity, Tezcatlipoca, Lord of the Smoking Mirror. Among Amazonian societies the spirit world is closely associated with mirrors and to the Aztecs, Tezcatlipoca was able to use his mirror to see into the souls of men, ‘in much the same way as the shamans of the Amazon’. In another manifestation, Tezcatlipoca could become Tepeyollotli – the jaguar who lived at the heart of the mountain. Volcanoes, which are mountains, are where obsidian is mined so there is a link between jaguars, volcanoes, sacrifice and deities. The pyramid at La Venta which, for a variety of reasons has never been properly excavated, seems to be a model of a volcano, with its shape and the rest of the complex being in the stylised form of a jaguar face.26
As Saunders concludes: ‘Thus there would appear to be a conceptual link between the shaman as jaguar in tribal societies and Tezcatlipoca as jaguar in the Aztec pantheon. Cultures and civilisations may vary in their size and sophistication, but many of the underlying ideas, and the patterns of thought and association, remain.’ Even for the cultures of the imperial Aztecs, the essence of ‘jaguarness’ was ever-present.27
We can go further. We have seen that, overall, there are two overlapping complexes linked to the jaguar. There is the jaguar-volcano-sacrifice-deity complex; and there is the jaguar-night-underworld-water-rain-thunder-war-aggresion-sex-coca-hallucinogen-shaman-superiority complex. Can these be put together in the following fashion to explain the very militaristic, sacrifice-oriented civilisations that developed in Mesoamerica?
In a temperate society practising agriculture, as evolved in the Old World, the annual cycle of sowing, growing, ripening and reaping was practised, based on rhythms that were observed if not fully understood and against the (deep) background of the weakening monsoon. One consequence of this was that worship of fertility was – eventually and for the most part – rewarded. The worshippers observed the sun in the sky and though they knew that movements were reliable, while they didn’t understand the reasons for them they could never be certain they would continue. From time to time eclipses occurred and though they never lasted for very long, who was to say that one day they might? The rains were less predictable. They had their own – related �
�� rhythms but again, from time to time they failed, making the need for worship more urgent. But again, and despite episodic variations, eventually, the rain gods responded. Essentially, worship in temperate agricultural societies worked.
In tropical forest zones, however, where many plants grew throughout the year, fertility was less of an issue. It was not a non-issue but it was less important. What was more important were the threats in the environment – hurricanes, earthquakes, the volcanoes, both above ground and below the surface of the sea, generating super-waves, the increasing frequency of El Niño, generating ferocious thunderstorms with high destructive winds, and the wild animals, in particular the ferocious jaguar. Importantly, these operated on no rhythm, no rhythm that early man could observe anyway, and this is something that applied also with the jaguar. According to Robert Wrangham, ‘to judge from records of attacks by jaguars, modern hunter-gatherers are safer in camp at night than they are on the hunt by day’ and that must have been even more true in the distant past.28
In other words, the aggressive and dangerous jaguar was like hostile and dangerous weather: unpredictable. That so many depictions of the jaguar in South and Central American records show his fangs, or his sexual or other attacks on humans, or draw attention to – or seek to emulate – his sharp claws, and other warlike qualities, underscore that he was what he is: a predatory carnivore, the king of the jungle, of the night. In such an environment, therefore, instead of praying in the hope of making something happen (rain, green shoots, growth), a large element of worship in the New World was to make something not happen: to stave off fierce winds, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, super-waves, and attacks by jaguars. Whereas the main form of Old World fertility religions was supplication, in the New World it was propitiation.
If one accepts this analysis, one can begin to see how sacrificial rituals in the New World became – as they did become – increasingly bloodthirsty. In Africa today, it is well known that if a lion, say, kills and eats a human, the rest of the tribe must go out and find the man-eater, and kill it, for if they do not the animal will return to where it was rewarded and try to kill again. In the rainforest, however, it would have been much more difficult to know which jaguar had made the kill. No doubt, on many occasions, the tribal members did go out in search of a man-eating jaguar, but an effective alternative, against a deep background of the increased incidence of environmental and other ‘attacks’, may have been to offer a captive, real flesh and blood but not one of the tribe, either in a sacred ceremony, or by leaving the body to be found by the jaguar, well away from the village. A third alternative was to have a shaman deal with the jaguar.
But here is the main point: Worship would not have worked. Or, it would have worked fitfully, at certain times but not at others, with no order to when it did and didn’t succeed. El Niños, earthquakes, volcanoes and jaguar attacks occur on no rhythm, are entirely unpredictable. In such an environment, it would have seemed to early man that the gods were not just angry but in addition dissatisfied with the offerings being made, which were not sufficient. So they would have offered more, in an increasingly desperate attempt to placate the gods’ anger.
This is speculation, of course, and by the time of the Aztecs sacrifice was designed to feed the appetite of the sun. How did this notion of the ‘appetite’ of the sun arise? Could it have been that, following volcanic eruptions, eruptions of mountains perhaps located beyond the horizon, but whose ash plumes rose high in the sky, the sun was blocked from view, in effect it failed to rise, it failed to appear for a number of days? Alternatively, or additionally, if the sun failed to appear, following an eruption in which many people were killed, this could well have fuelled the idea that the sun ‘needed’ human blood to raise itself from the horizon in the morning.
We have seen that the Aztec elite warriors were Eagle and Jaguar Societies, and we know that the colour of the jaguar pelt was early on associated with the rising sun. It is certainly possible, therefore, that, as shamanistic practices subsided, jaguar motifs were transferred and transformed into other ideas.
The essential point to keep in mind is that the dominant gods (not all) in the Old World were responsive to worship, because of natural rhythms existing in temperate societies but which, at the time, were not understood. In the tropical New World, on the other hand, the gods were unpredictable and seemingly unappeasable. This was a profound difference.
THE SCIENCE OF THE STAMPEDE
After ~9000 BC, Palaeo-Indian groups throughout most of North America diversified away from big-game hunting.29 Some bands adapted to increasingly arid conditions in the west and placed their major emphasis on plant foods. The sparse Palaeo-Indian population of the Eastern Woodlands (east of the Mississippi), on the other hand, pursued deer and other forest game, also relying on seasonal vegetable foods. Most notable of all perhaps, on the Great Plains of North America, there was a switch from hunting several megafauna to hunting just one – the bison. Only on the Great Plains did big-game hunting remain a viable life-way, a life-way that was to survive well into historical times.
The rise of the bison had everything to do with the way the landscape of North America had changed since the late Ice Age. By 9000 BC, there was a vast tract – a sea – of arid grassland that stretched from the southern edges of Alaska to the banks of the Rio Grande, separating what is now the United States from Mexico. This, the ‘Great Bison belt’, lay mainly in the rain shadow that existed to the east of the Rocky Mountains. Most of the year the plains suffered under a dry air mass. Rain in spring and summer favoured a special type of short grass which concealed most of its biomass underground, retaining moisture in its roots. It was the bison’s ability to get at these roots that ensured the species’ survival.30
Primeval forms of bison reached very impressive dimensions, some with huge horns spreading six feet or more from tip to tip, the remains of which have been found all the way from Alberta to Texas, and from California to Florida. After the ice melted, bison became more plentiful, but also got physically smaller.
Plains Indians had a distinctive lifestyle. For the most part, they moved around continuously in small bands exploiting relatively few locations in a regular cycle. These movements depended to an extent on the distribution of certain forms of fine-grained rock, out of which they fashioned the large tools needed to kill big, mobile animals like bison.31
The changeover from Clovis to Folsom tools is associated with the change from really big game to bison. Folsom tools are smaller than Clovis ones and are heavily ‘fluted’ – to remind ourselves, they have a concave groove running down most of their length on both faces, and two ‘ears’ sticking out at the end away from the point. Though no one really knows, the speculation is that the ‘ears’ were used to haft the tool to a spear and the fluting, though it may have strengthened the tool, as well as reducing its weight and help letting the animal bleed, hastening its death, may also by this time have had a religious function. This speculation stems from the fact that an analysis of early Plains Indian debris shows that many fluted points were broken in the process of manufacture. Would any workman have persevered with so many failures without good reason?
A lot has been inferred from the patterns of human and animal remains that have been unearthed. Such remains as have been found suggest that, to begin with, just after 9000 BC, Palaeo-Indians were less sophisticated in their choice of prey, whereas later they concentrated on killing cow and calf herds. There is also evidence that their stone tools became more standardised later on, suggesting that they had evolved a successful common method of slaughter. Further, it also seems that the Palaeo-Indians regularly killed more beasts than could be eaten at once. Could this mean that they attacked the animals in winter time, in freezing conditions, and then lived alongside the (preserved) animals, eating their way through the cold months? Another finding is that the pattern of remains suggests that human bands were smaller in the south-west than in the north. Does this mean that bison habits were l
ess predictable in the south-west and did this hinder the development of settled, more complex societies?
The best-known fact about bison hunting is the communal drives. Were these regular occurrences, or infrequent ceremonies with a ritual function as well as providing food? Sites with evidence of communal drives – Bonfire Shelter, Lindenmeier, Olsen-Chubbock, all in Colorado, where the animals were driven over cliffs, into sand dunes, into dead-end canyons – have been found, in which herds of up to 250–270 beasts were stampeded. These ‘orgies of killing’, as they have been called, date to between 10000 and 3000 BC. Not all of these took place in winter, so – again speculating – perhaps different bands of people came together at set times of the year for ritualised hunts. As well as being a very practical solution on the food front, these gatherings would have helped in the exogamous selection of mates, and may also have involved a religious element. Dennis Stanford, director of the Palaeo-Indian programme at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, identified traces of a ‘stout wooden pole’ near one bison corral, with an antler flute and a miniature projectile point nearby. He argues that the wooden upright may have served as a ‘shaman pole’ with the associated artefacts part of the ritual paraphernalia.32 A religious dimension is also suggested by the discoveries at a relatively new site, Certasin in Oklahoma, where an arroyo filled with bison bones from a mass stampede was found. In the centre of this was discovered a skull with a forehead adorned with a red mark in the shape of a lightning bolt.
