balam

 Balam - the Mayan name for Jaguar.

The ruins of the Yucatán Peninsula are full of jaguar imagery. For thousands of years, peoples of many cultures have admired and feared its power, strength, and hunting prowess. The jaguar also came to symbolize “beauty, power, cunning, and mystery entwined in rituals and stories.” For the Mayan culture in particular, the jaguar’s skin is said to resemble the heavens and starry night sky if it were spread out. The jaguar is a god of duality – of day and night, and of fear and admiration…

“According to one Maya myth, it was a supernatural being, Jaguar Sun, who rose each day in the east and prowled west, aging along the course, until finally plunging into the darkness of the west. Then Jaguar Sun fights the Lords of Xibalba (the Underworld) all night. Through his strength and cunning, Jaguar Sun wins the right to rise each day in the East.”

One Mayan creation myth recounts:

“As god created people out of mud, jaguar, curious, watched. God didn't want jaguar to know how this was done, so he sent jaguar to the river to fetch water, using a leaky calabash to fill a jar. God figured to finish people by the time jaguar returned. At the river, as jaguar was mindlessly scooping water with the leaky calabash, frog advised patching the holes with mud. Very quickly, jaguar filled the jug and returned to the god who had finished 13 of the people and 12 arms; god was in the process of making a dog.”

While Jaguar expressed an interest in eating the dog, “God said the dog was to serve people and that the arms were to teach jaguar respect.”

After man wounded Jaguar’s paw twice, he learnt to leave humans alone. (He did eat the dog though.) Even still, people were still fearful and envious of Jaguar’s hunting ability and power.

“But although these powers are alluring, the jaguar teaches that people should never try to be what they aren't, as in the story of the possum who asked the jaguar to be godfather to her son… Jaguar, to be a good godfather, took little possum hunting at the waterhole. Jaguar leapt on a very large animal. The possum and jaguar ate their fill. Later the little possum took his mother to the waterhole where the little possum leapt upon a very large animal, but the animal simply shook himself and threw the little possum off into the mud. The little possum called his mother for help, but when she came to him, she, too, was trapped, and they both died. Jaguar stories also teach that power, by itself, is not enough.”

Then there is the story of the three lazy jaguars that were dying of hunger but didn’t want to find food. The rabbit asked them why they were complaining – they had been given the perfect hunting tools of claws and fangs ­– but the jaguars just grumbled that it was too much work to hunt.

“Rabbit offered to carry the jaguars into the forest if they would climb into a net. Once they were in the net, rabbit tied it shut, then found a long green guava stick and beat the jaguars. ‘You are built like great hunters, but you are lazy beasts.’ Thus the jaguar can be wise and foolish, powerful and weak.”

There are many myths about the jaguar even within the Mayan culture. Some say  “The Jaguar Sun has the wisdom and mystery of day and night, life and death, [while] other stories give a jaguar deity the power to eat the sun. One Maya story says that the end of the earth will come when jaguars ascend from the underworld to eat the sun and moon, maybe the universe; an eclipse will foreshadow this final event.”

But the Mayans believed that appeasing the Jaguar Sun god with rituals, singing, and honoring them in various ways has prevented this occurrence.

“Perhaps the stories and details about the jaguar are contradictory in part because people themselves are contradictory. Sometimes humans protect the jungle and share in its bounty. Sometimes people foolishly take more than is needed for food, consuming their environment - maybe even themselves.”

Text paraphrased and quoted from: http://www.oneworldjourneys.com/jaguar/jag_myth/body.html
Jaguar Rising by Marian Blue (2001-2002)