Skulls, Skeletons, Canines & Claws

[Dark Jaguar]

Los espíritus-jaguares: cráneos-trofeos y chamanismo entre los mojos (siglo XVII)*

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Two skull-trophies preserved by a Yurakaré tribe man (Alto-Sécure)


''If the skulls of prey are exposed to facilitate hunting and function as a magnet, then it is perfectly understandable that skulls of predators - such as the jaguar - could have had the reverse virtue, because if you want animals to eat, you do not want a jaguar come to eat, either in the form of a beast or in a spiritual form.

The conservation of the jaguar skull for this purpose is also attested in the region. The Yurakarés still put it into practice, although there has never been mentioned in their ethnography, both ancient and contemporary, a complex of trophies of the same order as in the case of the mojos. In the early 2000s, I was in the upper Sécure river where a man kept discreetly in his house, on a shelf, two skulls of jaguars that he had killed (fig. 1). Placed in this place to prevent children from poking at them, they had undergone a specific treatment to neutralize their predatory power. They were coiled with a wire that prevented them from opening their mouths, a device my host compared to a muzzle. He also explained to me that their "owners" (a term equivalent to "soul") were still there and that now they served to drive away from his house, isolated from the town, jaguars that might have attacked his dogs or the pigs he raised. The "owners" communicated with the flesh and blood jaguars requesting that they "do not disturb" and that they go hunting elsewhere. I will add that the son of this man gave me as a friendship a jaguar skull that he kept (without wire), affirming that with it he would be able to "walk in peace." He pointed out that it was going to be the case at least as long as the fangs were not split in half which would mean that the owner was gone. "You have to take care of him" he said with a smile full of mischief...

The trophy skulls preserved by the mojos were active on the record of war and protection and made to last; they were not as ephemeral as other trophy heads such as those of the Jivaros or the Mundurukús. It is important to emphasize the fact that we are, among the mojos, in front of trophies of bones. This detail is not trivial, since they can thus fulfill a long-term social function like all the conserved vestiges of this matter (Chaumeil, 1997). These are human and animal remains that, when ritually elaborated, acquire, so to speak, a new life: their production as a trophy is substituted for the mourning process that they would have received from their relatives. The souls of enemies of humans or jaguars could thus become "allied" with their killers: reinforcements against their ex-relatives or guards doing work of dissuasion with their ex-congeners, they converted to the cause of their owners.''


Fig. 1

© Vincent Hirtzel, 2000

*This image is copyright of its original author

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