Andean and Amazonian Traditions

Thread○

The Jaguar

A powerful spiritual and transformative symbol appearing across four thousand years and two continents of American cultures, from ancient Mexico to the Amazon basin.

SignificanceThis continuity is genuine and traceable through specific dated objects across a very long span, from an ancient Mexican were-jaguar sculpture to documented Amazonian shamanic jaguar-transformation beliefs recorded by a named anthropologist. The commercial 'jaguar medicine' branding now used in some retreat marketing, however, is a coinage from the 1990s with no source in any of these actual historical traditions.

Practice○

Inti Raymi

An Inca sun festival held at the June solstice, now restaged annually as a major public ceremony in Cusco.

What it isIn Garcilaso's account the Incas kept the festival to honour the Sun as the god whose light raises and sustains all life, and as divine father of the first Inca: the ruler and his kin greeted its rising, kindled new fire from its rays, and gave thanks.

The FindingThe festival was banned outright by Spanish colonial authorities in 1572 and vanished for over three centuries. What visitors see today is a twentieth-century theatrical reconstruction, staged for the first time in 1944 from a description in a seventeenth-century book — not a continuously surviving rite.