Episode 20: Big Cats in Folklore

Amanda’s Notes:

Corinne’s Notes:

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaguars_in_Mesoamerican_cultures

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERTXJMaGltg 

http://www.famsi.org/research/kerr/articles/friction_drum/ 

Saunders, N. J. (1994). Predators of Culture: Jaguar Symbolism and Mesoamerican Elites. World Archaeology, 26(1), 104–117. http://www.jstor.org/stable/124867 

https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/jaguar-cult-downs-syndrome-were-jaguar/ 

Murdy, C. N. (1981). Congenital Deformities and the Olmec Were-Jaguar Motif. American Antiquity, 46(4), 861–871. https://doi.org/10.2307/280112 

Robicsek, F. (1983). Of Olmec Babies and Were-Jaguars. Mexicon, 5(1), 7–19. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23759045 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger#Myth_and_legend 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_in_Chinese_culture 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Symbols 

When we first started discussing an episode on Big Cats, I asked Amanda if she wanted to take Central and South America as well as US and Canada for her segment, and she was EXTREMELY gracious and allowed me to take Central and South America so that I could talk about Jaguars.

Please note, Jaguars are 100% on the list of things I want to pet that will kill me. But they’re so gorgeous and I just want to pet one! AHEM.

To dive right in, jaguars play a key role throughout mesoamerican cultures, especially for the Aztec, Maya and Olmec peoples of what is now modern day Mexico and into the rest of Central America. Often, the ruling class would be closely associated with jaguars, including wearing jaguar pelts as part of their regalia, or including “jaguar” in the names they took as rulers. Jaguars were also frequently linked to spiritual leaders. However, Nicholas Saunders notes in his article “Predators of Culture: Jaguar Symbolism and Mesoamerican Elites” that relying on older scholarship has added some pitfalls into determining how these different cultures from different time periods viewed jaguars (and themselves)- a lot of scholarship uses a very euro-centric views regarding big cats (i.e. OBVIOUSLY the [insert culture here] viewed jaguars the same way that europeans view tigers/lions/leopards), and also from a presumption that the Olmec culture was a “mother culture” from whom the Maya and Aztec directly drew all of their beliefs and culture. That said, there’s compelling evidence that both the Maya and the Aztec used jaguar iconography very similarly, especially with regards to ideal traits of warriors and with their association with powerful rulers/spiritual leaders

Anyway, as I was perusing the wikipedia page on Jaguars in Mesoamerican culture, I spotted a reference to Olmec “were jaguars”, which are depictions of human faces with somewhat feline features, to a greater or lesser degree. And like, if you say the word “were jaguar” to me, of course I’m gonna dig into it! And actually the theory behind “were jaguars” is not at all what I expected! The prevailing theory, going back to the 1930s, is that these figurines represent individuals born with cognitive and genetic disabilities, such as Trisomy 21 (more frequently known as Down Syndrome), hydrocephalus, and even spina bifida. Because their features are “different”, it’s presumed that the Olmec believed that these children were born as the result of a human and a jaguar having sex, and may have had some sort of spiritual significance. I’ve linked a few articles, but please be aware that some of the language used is outdated and struck me as unkind and dehumanizing. I did link another article that summarily refutes that theory (again with the outdated, unkind, and dehumanizing language), and instead posits that at least some of these “were jaguar” or “jaguar children” statues are just… statues of children. So ultimately the “were jaguars” of Olmec culture are a great big *shrug* it seems. I kind of went off-piste with this one y’all, but to be honest, you never quite know what rabbit hole you’re going to go down when you fire up Google.

One final note on this bit of my research- I’ve linked a few places to a reference I found to the Maya Jaguar Drum, which is a really fucking cool bit of Ethnomusicology. In a piece of Maya art discovered in modern day Guatemala, there was an image of a musician playing a unique stringed instrument - this is the only evidence of a stringed instrument in any pre-European contact cultures in the Americas so that’s the first really cool thing. The string itself is connected to a drum, which makes this particular instrument also a friction drum, another instrument type not known to be used in indigenous cultures in the Americas. Ethnomusicologists were able to recreate the instrument and play it based on the image. And when played, it makes a sound almost identical to the growl of a jaguar. Just. How amazing is that?

[THIS SECTION IS OPTIONAL; WATCH UR TIME]

Going to shift gears yet again and also talk about Tigers because ya girl loves charismatic megafauna, and also I’m still salty that my mom has gotten to touch a tiger and I haven’t (my mom was head of PR at the zoo in the 1980s, she got to do a ton of unbelievably cool shit in her line of work, and I will never be as badass as she is).

I don’t know why I didn’t initially think of tigers when we decided to do Big Cats in mythology, until I was FORCIBLY reminded that East Asia actually has a lot of myths about tigers when Byakko, the Japanese variant of one of those myths appeared in the YA romance novel I was reading. 

Which myth am I referring to? The white tiger who represents the cardinal direction west and the season of autumn. While he’s known as Byakko in Japanese, in Chinese he is better known as Baihu (which quite literally means White Tiger), and is one of the four “Guardian Constellations”-- one for each of the cardinal directions. Baihu’s stripes on his forehead are shaped to make the hanzi “wang”, which means king. The oldest known representation of Baihu comes from about 5300 BCE from a tomb in Henan Province. 

Some other cool notes about the white tiger include:

• It was believed that a tiger had to live 500 years before it turned white

• White tigers appear when the reigning emperor is good and just OR if there’s peace throughout the world

• Tigers in general are considered protector figures, which I love a lot

  • Art of tigers is a frequent motif on tombs, because they’re meant to chase away evil spirits

  • They’re also meant to chase away what’s referred to as the three disasters: fire, thieves, and ghosts.