The Jaguar Within: Shamanic Visions in Ancient Central and South American Art

An important new way of viewing the prehistoric art of the Americas, The Jaguar Within demonstrates that understanding a work of art's connection with shamanic trance can lead to an appreciation of it as an extremely creative solution to the inherent challenge of giving material form to nonmaterial realities and states of being.

On a pragmatic level, certain experiences may be deemed basic to human existence: the pull of gravity on the body; the perceptibly stable appearance of different phenomena in nature (including a human always actually being human and not something else); and the apparent categories of animate and inanimate, of life and death, as mutually exclusive states. Each of these “normal” experiences, however, can be called into question by going beyond the pragmatic into other modes of perception, such as trance consciousness. Peter Stahl wrote, “Cosmographically coextant with an observable world of mundane events is a world of mythic time and space which is most consistently visited through ritually ecstatic alteration of body and spirit” (1986: 134). During trances, the corporeal is reported to fall away, and gravity’s weight is replaced by a feeling of soaring flight. Plants, animals, and humans merge and exchange identities with one’s human self in rapid flashes of transformation, and a shared animation pervades all things, even remaking death itself within the larger cosmic flux. The rules that govern vision in the quotidian realm do not apply when visiting this visionary one; it is where one sees with one’s eyes closed, where geometric patterns and enormous snakes abound, where tiny spirit-beings advise, and the outsized human ego dissolves in the face of essential truths and interconnections.

This book considers how deep familiarity with and profound respect for such extraordinary visionary experiences deeply affected the artistic output of American indigenous cultures before the European invasions of the sixteenth century. Focusing