Coyatchicüra

Tikuna · numen · Tikuna traditional religion; continuing · numen

Coyatchicüra, 'the jaguar's snout', is one of the celestial beings of Tikuna sky-knowledge, a constellation whose annual passage across the heavens the Tikuna read as a sign of the turning seasons. In the ethnoastronomy recorded for the people, the constellations are treated as beings that were once terrestrial, and Coyatchicüra is drawn among the star-figures depicted on the ritual artefacts of the girls' puberty festival, where it is bound to the imagery of the jaguar clan. As a jaguar of the sky it links the animal that most concentrates Tikuna cosmological attention to the ordering of time and the ceremonial life of the moiety and clan system.

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