The Jaguar is the predatory spirit who fathers the transformer twins. In the widely shared Xingu narrative the demiurge shapes women from wood and gives one to the Jaguar as a wife; from that union the Sun and Moon are conceived, though their mother is slain before they are born. The motif belongs to a great swathe of lowland South American myth in which twin heroes are the offspring of a jaguar and a slain mother and go on to become the sun and moon. Sources across the region differ in the details of the Jaguar's part, but agree in placing him at the head of the demiurges' descent.