The Jaguar's Mother

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.

Children

• Nitsuegï

Domains

• cannibalism
• monstrous elder

Powers

• Kills and would devour her son's wife

Relations

• child: NitsuegïThe jaguar Nitsuegï is her son.Ellen B. Basso, A Musical View of the Universe (1985) (secondary)
• enemy: The Wooden WomanShe murders her son's wooden wife.Kalapalo twin narrative in Ellen B. Basso, A Musical View of the Universe (1985) (primary)
• enemy: TaugiKalapalo twin narrative in Ellen B. Basso, A Musical View of the Universe (1985) (primary)
• enemy: AulukumãKalapalo twin narrative in Ellen B. Basso, A Musical View of the Universe (1985) (primary)

Sources

• An old cannibal jaguar-woman, mother of Nitsuegï, murders the twins' pregnant mother and is avenged by the twins.: Ellen B. Basso, A Musical View of the Universe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985) (secondary)