Rop

Canela · numen · Canela traditional religion; continuing · numen

In the Eastern Timbira fire myth the jaguar, Rop, is the original master of fire, the one being who owns a hearth and eats its meat roasted while humankind still eats raw. Finding a boy stranded on a cliff-face where he had climbed after macaw fledglings and then been abandoned, the jaguar carries him home on its back, treats him as an adopted son, and feeds him cooked food; the jaguar's wife is hostile and menacing in most tellings. When the boy flees with a burning log, the first fire passes to the Canela, and the jaguar is left thereafter to eat its prey raw. Sources present the jaguar with a certain ambivalent generosity, benefactor and danger at once, in keeping with its wider place in Timbira thought.

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