The Jaguar's Mother

Kalapalo · numen · Kalapalo traditional religion; continuing · numen

The jaguar's mother is an aged, man-eating itseke, mother of the jaguar Nitsuegï. When her son takes the wooden woman to wife, the old woman kills her daughter-in-law while she is pregnant, and it is this act that the twins are born to avenge. Raising the very children whose mother she has slain, she embodies the danger that Kalapalo narrative locates within the affinal household of the jaguar. Her defeat by the grown twins closes the primordial cycle of the murdered mother.

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