“By means of tigers”: Jaguars as Agents of Conversion in Jesuit Mission Records of Paraguay and the Moxos, 1600–1768

Abstract

In the mid-1600s, the Jesuit Antonio Ruiz de Montoya reported that man-eating jaguars were helping to convert Guaraní Indians to Catholicism. This article tests his claim by aggregating multiple mentions of jaguars found in the accounts and letters of Jesuit missionaries in the reductions of Paraguay and the Moxos from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, including the writing of Jesuits Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, François-Xavier Eder, Alonso Messia, and Martín Dobrizhoffer. Cumulatively, their predator sightings and references suggest that, indeed, the actions of real jaguars were transforming local religious beliefs. The presence of jaguars in Jesuit records also reveals the complexity of missionary and indigenous attitudes towards animals. Jesuits often associated jaguars with pre-Christian jaguar-shaman rituals, but also considered them to be divine instruments. Indigenous peoples sometimes preserved older practices, but also occasionally took real jaguars as an impetus to convert to Christianity. Both Jesuits and indigenous peoples reacted to jaguar incursions with violence as well as spiritual reflection. Most importantly, the prominence of active jaguars on this contested religious frontier suggests that animals should be viewed as more than symbols in Christian history. Jesuit records indicate that jaguars were key third players in zones where Europeans and indigenous populations met.

“Heaven overcame their savagery by means of tigers,” the Jesuit Antonio Ruiz de Montoya wrote of the nearly six thousand Guaraní converts to Christianity at the reduction of Santo Tomé, in the colonial province of Paraguay in the mid-1600s. “[The tigers] ranged in packs through the clearings, farms and forests, killing many people, mainly pagans who rebelliously avoided the Fathers . . . As a result all the pagans started coming into the reduction, and this affliction was ended by a novena of sung Masses.”¹ Montoya went on to chronicle in harrowing detail the systematic attacks against the Guaraní who lived outside the Christianized Santo Tomé mission. A group of Guaraní tried to build a defensive palisade against the tigers, but the tigers circled it for four days without allowing them to exit. Weeks later, tigers returned to wreak havoc against new converts whose faith had lapsed, and who had made the mistake of leaving the reduction to consult traditional “magicians.” This time, the Guaraní set “more than two hundred traps” against the rampaging tigers, baiting them with deer and dogs, but with no success. The clever tigers somehow managed to extract the meat without being trapped and continued to attack humans. Montoya reported that the Guaraní then realized that “the animals' behavior went beyond what was natural,” and could only be staved off “by means of [Christian] prayers and petitions.”²

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of this seventeenth-century Jesuit report is that it was neither isolated, nor rare. Letters from the Jesuit missions in South America are filled with accounts of jaguars, the “tigers” in Montoya's report. This article aggregates mentions of jaguars found in the accounts and letters of Jesuit missionaries in the Catholic reductions in two zones between the mid-1600s and mid-1700s: Paraguay, and the Moxos missions. Though these mission zones are separated by more than a thousand miles, jaguars played crucial roles on both contested frontiers where they sometimes prompted conversion. Jesuit eyewitnesses to jaguar encounters seemed especially willing to give jaguars due measure for helping to spread Catholicism. Yet historians and scholars of religion instead continue to give the lion's share of credit for Christianizing the Americas to human actors.

It is important to call attention back to the historical impact of jaguars on early modern conversions to Christianity for at least two reasons. First of all, these dynamic jaguars appear in Jesuit writings with positive, not demonic attributions. This is unusual.³ Generally, missionaries in jaguar-populated frontiers wrote transparently about being wary of jaguars because of their centrality in pre-Christian indigenous religions. Jaguars tend to surface in pre-eighteenth century Catholic records as troublesome indicators of failure to convert. A particularly dramatic example of this comes from the city of Texcoco in the heartland of Mexico in 1536, when a local shaman, Martin Ocelotl, was brought before the Inquisition by Franciscan missionary Fray Antonio de Ciudad Rodrigo under charges that included shape-shifting into jaguar form.⁴ The Nahuatl word “ocelotl” means jaguar, a coincidence that inspired historian Patricia Lopes Don to entitle her section describing the trial “Friars v. Jaguar.”⁵ In the context of an Inquisition investigation, Spanish settlers as well as missionaries were quick to describe jaguars negatively, associating Ocelotl with the persistence of indigenous beliefs and even with the devil.⁶ Patricia Lopes Don cleaves closely to her archival material by also linking jaguars directly to “native sorcerers” like Ocelotl, focusing on the jaguar's old indigenous symbolisms rather than on its potentially new Catholic meaning. She interprets both the jaguar and its human namesake in the 1536 case as directly opposed to Christianity.⁷

But jaguars could also be congruent with Catholicism, as the Jesuit Montoya claimed in the 1630s. A few scholars have teased out how missionaries and indigenous neophytes alike were able to twist jaguars to fit Christian understandings, thus using these animals to encourage conversion to Catholicism. For instance, Davíd Carrasco singles out a group of converted Maya in the city of Mérida in Mexico's Yucatán peninsula whom he calls “Jaguar Christians,” or “Christians in terms of the Maya worldview.”⁸ Carrasco bases his interpretation on a manuscript of late colonial Maya construction, The Book of Chilam Balam of Tizimin, which retells Mayan history from the seventh through the nineteenth centuries. The history was cumulatively recorded by Mayan priests in twenty-year cycles, with each cycle having an official prophet known as the “Chilam Balam,” or Spokesman of the Jaguar. Carrasco flags this passage of the Tizimin manuscript that refers to the sixteenth century, the cycle “11 Ahau” that was marked by the Spanish Conquest:

So be it: Your younger brothers are coming!

Your older brothers are arriving

To change your pants,

To change your clothes,

To whiten your dress,

To whiten your pants—

The foreign judges,

The bearded men

Of Heaven Born Merida,

The seat of the lands.

And they

Are the sun priests

Of the living God,

The True God.

He shall be worshiped

In one communion

On earth

Below:

An additional

Rule.

And for the fatherless,

And for the motherless--

Jaguar was the head

And urged his people

To be sprinkled

In the changed city.

So came about

Its founding,

And it was the founding

Of the three-part rule

In Heaven Born Merida.⁹

Here we have another “Ocelotl,” or human who has assumed the literal title of Jaguar, or “Balam.” In this case, Jaguar is not just a tag of sacred identity, but also an official administrative post, “the highest native official in Mayan communities who controlled public offices, land titles, and tribute rights.”¹⁰ This Mayan Jaguar, a contemporary of the Nahua shaman called Jaguar, exhorted his followers to move in precisely the opposite direction: while Martin Ocelotl pulled away from Christianity, this Balam pushed towards it, directing the Maya of Mérida to be “sprinkled” or baptized into the Christian faith.

Thus, scholars on the hunt for spiritually resonant jaguars in the historical record today can find evidence to support either interpretation of jaguars as being flashpoints for religious competition or convergence. However, the problem with focusing on these two poles is that they make the story exclusively about humans, reducing the jaguar to a mere title or human-manipulated tool. David Quammen addresses this troubling distortion in the field of religious studies in reference to the one hundred thirty mentions of lions in the Bible. In his global consideration of “man-eaters” or “alpha predators,” a category that includes jaguars alongside lions, Quammen asks, “[Were] biblical lions, purely imaginary beasts? Were they phantasms concocted from distantly rumored archetypes? No, they were real lions cast in a pageant of holy parable.”¹¹ Kristin Dombek follows such holy pageant-casting in earnest in her study of how animals figure in evangelical Christian stage plays about the apocalypse in the United States today. She writes that some Christian figurative usage of animals can “sacrifice the animality of the animal—and the animal in the human—to create the fiction of a human-centered world.”¹² Quammen, Dombek and others contributing to the new field of Animal Studies have brought animals into the limelight as initiators and participants in their own right, with the capacity to significantly affect outcomes in the history of the planet.¹³ Laura Hobgood-Oster summarizes their plea to Church historians most succinctly in her 2008 book Holy Dogs and Asses: Animals in the Christian Tradition. In her attempt to write animals back into the Christian past specifically, Hobgood-Oster argues that “reading animals as only and always symbol is escapist and serves to reinforce human superiority and dominance.”¹⁴

Yet lack of concrete information about animals in the distant past makes it difficult to move beyond the sphere of religious symbolism. For instance, in his landmark 1993 article “Santiago's Horse: Christianity and Colonial Indian Resistance in the Heartland of New Spain,” historian William Taylor invokes horses to demonstrate how in Mexico, animals were once seen as “agents of greater forces working upon human destiny.”¹⁵ Taylor describes how this belief led some Catholic Indians to privilege the horse of St. James (Santiago) over the saint himself well into the eighteenth century, when sometimes they represented the horse without its saintly rider in ritual dances. Taylor offers a tantalizing glimpse of how real Spanish horses might have been experienced by local and eventually Christianized populations in Mexico in the early centuries of encounter, with horses being seen “not as obedient brutes or emblems of the owners' social standing but as courageous, powerful animal warriors that may have acted in unison with their riders but were independent of them.”¹⁶ If Taylor is correct that we lost Santiago for his horse in early modern Catholic Mexico, we have gone on to lose the horse as well in even our best post-modern analyses. For Taylor's article still focuses on the idea of an animal as it has been represented by humans, rather than on the animal itself. The idea of a saint's horse can be tracked in our anthropocentric archives, whereas the literal horse of St. James and the individual horses of eighteenth-century Mexican Catholics are more elusive.

However, due to positive Jesuit record-keeping about jaguars in Paraguay and the Moxos in the 1700s, a handful of individual jaguars from that region have been preserved. The second intervention of this article is to insist that these animals were, and should be, more than an idea in histories of Christianity. Amazonian jaguars endured and aggressively intruded in the new mix of creatures on the frontier, sometimes significantly changing the course of human events there. Jesuit foregrounding of jaguars as movers and shakers in Catholic history additionally demonstrates how Church records can be used to counterbalance narrow interpretations of first encounters. For instance, recently there has been renewed interest in rewriting narratives of the conquest of the Americas to highlight animals, plants and microbes as active contributors. In many of these new tellings, European animals have a fearsome surplus of agency, appearing en masse as a kind of plague. Imported horses, cattle, pigs, and sheep are cited for proliferating outside of human control, cumulatively destroying or irrevocably altering New World environments.¹⁷ Missionary accounts preserve a different and critical counterpoint from that era, however. In the cases presented here, Jesuit writers illuminate autochthonous, definitively local, American fauna. Jaguars figure in Paraguayan and Moxos reports as a useful reminder that native animal kingdoms were key third players in zones where Europeans and indigenous populations met.

How did real jaguars affect the Paraguayan and Moxos fields of conversion? This article begins to answer that question by introducing the major actors in these mission frontiers at the turn of the eighteenth century: jaguars, Jesuits, and the many indigenous populations gathered in the missions, most notably the Guaraní and the Moxos. Second, a few of the most gripping jaguar episodes culled from these Jesuit records are presented, to illustrate how some jaguars were engaging with human populations in the Amazon basin. The article ends with a consideration of retroactive human attempts to process jaguar presence, including reactions by Jesuits, indigenous converts, and jaguar-shamans. The evidence marshaled here shows that jaguars did indeed fuel Catholicism in this corner of the world, but not exactly in the way that the Jesuit Montoya portrayed. Jaguars did not show themselves to be of uniform mind about boosting the ranks of either Christianity or indigenous religions. They were, quite literally, the wild card in a human game. Yet their predatory actions in Paraguay and the Moxos did succeed in altering religious membership.

I. Jaguars, Jesuits and Converts

In 1713, in the lowlands of the Amazon River basin in what is today Bolivia, Jesuit Alonso Messia reported the success of missionary efforts among the Moxos Indians only three decades after the establishment of the first mission there. “[The Moxos Indians] are so well instructed in the appreciation of [Christian] Salvation . . . that whenever they are going to absent themselves from the town, they confess first,” Messia wrote. But he then proceeded to credit more than Jesuit instructors for filling churches. He continued:

[They come] to the Church to partake of the sacraments of confession and communion to ensure by this their safety during trips, and to protect themselves from dangers, or contingencies, that arise on the paths, that usually traverse mountains and unpopulated fields, where Jaguars live, fierce[,] bloody and cruel, who are the fear of all of this land.¹⁸

Who were these fearsome jaguars, and were they really so much of a threat to humans that they contributed to church attendance?

The word used most often to describe this animal in Jesuit records is the Spanish “tigre,” but anthropologists and historians have identified it from early physical descriptions and from its habitat as the jaguar, or Panthera onca.¹⁹ The jaguar is the third biggest felid or predatory cat in the world after the tiger and lion, and it is the largest in the Western Hemisphere. As suggested from the wide swath of North, Central and South America referenced above, jaguars have an enormous range of nearly a million square miles.²⁰ Historically they have been found as far north as the southwestern United States and Mexico, throughout much of Central America especially Belize, and as far south as Paraguay and northern Argentina. This geographical expanse encompasses several different ecosystems including semi-deciduous and rain forests, tropical lowlands, and the environment most considered here: the seasonally flooded alluvial plains and grassy marshlands of the Pantanal zone between Paraguay and Brazil (home to the Paraguay missions), and the Beni savannas and Chaco region of Bolivia (home to the Moxos missions).²¹

Today's common term, “jaguar,” comes from the word “yaguareté” in the language of the Tupí and the Guaraní, two indigenous groups of Brazil and Paraguay who lived in the southern range of this animal.²² But missionaries coming from Europe and posted to diverse frontiers would have encountered a variety of local terms for it, such as the Nahuatl word “ocelotl” and the Yucatec Maya “balam.” Europeans were not likely to have encountered a jaguar before arriving to the Americas. Jesuits used the word “tiger” to describe it. Those large cats from India and Asia were entrenched in the European imaginary, rendered in art most often in hunting scenes. Hunting galleries inspired at least one engraver, Antonio Tempesta, to produce copies of images of large predatory cats that had much wider circulation than royal art collections.²³ Illustrations of tigers were also featured in medieval bestiaries, catalogs of wild and mystical beasts where tigers sometimes got their own chapter.²⁴ Bestiary references and drawings in Europe were usually fanciful representations of the animal that exaggerated salient features such as spots or stripes.²⁵ Realistic renderings of tigers did exist at the time, but they do not seem to have been in wide circulation.²⁶

The collection of real animals to furnish European curiosity cabinets and botanical and zoological research began in earnest in the seventeenth century, when a jaguar was first donated for this purpose to the gardens of Dutch Count Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen during his occupation of Brazil.²⁷ Real tigers were almost as uncommon in European-owned menageries. Tigers had been among the regular exotic imports of ancient Rome,²⁸ but they were kept in captivity comparatively rarely in Europe before 1800.²⁹ The city of Florence was one notable exception. There, inspired by the zoological gardens kept by Muslim rulers, nobles funded the largest menagerie in fifteenth-century Italy, which included tigers, bears, leopards which were used for hunting, and twenty-five lions housed in the Palazzo Vecchio itself.³⁰ Still, lions outnumbered tigers in that collection and in other cities of early modern Europe, with live lions kept and ceremonially displayed by the cities of Ghent and Venice in the fifteenth century.³¹

Lions also cropped up often in the Bible and the lives of the Christian saints, such as Saint Mark the evangelist, who was represented as a winged lion in Venetian iconography.³² In medieval bestiaries, lions were associated with Christ himself: lion cubs were depicted as being born dead, with the cub's father having to breathe in its face after three days to bring it to life, evoking the three days between Jesus's crucifixion and resurrection.³³ In some hagiographies, lions were often “endowed by reason” to protect or spare the lives of Christian saints.³⁴ The most celebrated example of this was the eleventh-century hagiography of Saint Jerome, who befriended a lion in a fashion reminiscent of the earlier second-century Roman story of Androcles and the lion. In the popular Roman fable of the condemned slave Androcles, a lion refused to eat him in the arena because Androcles had helped to pull a thorn from its paw. Similarly, Saint Jerome was credited with taming a lion in the wilderness, and the lion became part of his Christian iconography.³⁵

Given all of these references to lions, it is interesting that Jesuits in the Moxos and Paraguay chose “tiger” instead of “lion” to describe jaguars. Perhaps this was partly motivated by a desire for verisimilitude.³⁶ Jaguars, like the tigers in European illustrations, had distinctive markings on their skins. Beyond using the word “tiger,” the Jesuits endeavored to impart what jaguars were actually like to their European audiences through firsthand description. For the Jesuit Montoya, writing of Paraguay in the 1630s, hunting prowess was the jaguar's most arresting feature. In a short chapter called “Some Animals,” he listed jaguars as “tigers,” including them almost as an afterthought to two pages devoted to venomous snakes, evidently a more common danger to humans. Montoya introduced his readers to jaguars by recounting how a pair of jaguars jointly targeted a hog that had been trying to hide in the water. One jaguar jumped underwater to tackle this prey. “Out of curiosity I started saying Hail Marys,” Montoya related. “[W]hen I had got to the sixth, the tiger emerged with his prey already dead.”³⁷

A century and a half later in the Moxos missions, François-Xavier Eder also invoked the might of jaguars, introducing his European readers to the jaguar by referring to the size of its pelt.³⁸ “Jaguars are much bigger than the skins that are put today on race horses would have you think,” Eder explained. “I believe this is because [the skins seen in Europe] must come from Africa, or if they do come from Brazil or some other region of America, that just proves that there the jaguars are surely smaller than those from [the Moxos missions].”³⁹ It is not evident where Eder has seen jaguar skins used on racehorses. The Hussars or heavy cavalry from Poland in the early modern period wore tiger and leopard skins or rugs with that pattern over their shoulders as part of their battle uniform.⁴⁰ Writing centuries later about the gauchos or cattle ranchers in the pampas of Argentina that lie closer to Eder's missions, author Jorge Luis Borges mentioned horse saddle blankets trimmed in jaguar skin as a mark of wealth.⁴¹ But in light of the large number of hunting paintings and engravings popular in Europe, Eder might have been referring readers to tiger, not jaguar, pelts that were slung over horses as trophies after the hunt.⁴²

Eder devoted much more space to jaguars than his colleague Montoya. Montoya had worked in the Jesuit reductions in Paraguay for twenty-five years, from 1612 until 1637, acting as superior to the Guaraní missions during his last two years of service. He wrote and published his account of this region after the fact, in Spain, as part of a plea to the Spanish court to defend the Paraguay Indians from slave-raiding bandeirantes, and to justify some of his own controversial leadership decisions.⁴³ In light of this human-centered agenda, Montoya mentioned jaguars only in passing. Eder, on the other hand, left a firsthand description of the Moxos missions that he completed retrospectively in Slovakia at much more leisure, after the Society of Jesus was expelled from South America in 1768. Eder had served as a missionary to the Moxos for fifteen years since his first posting there in 1753 at the age of twenty-six.⁴⁴ He devoted one quarter of his lengthy 280-page report to listing the flora and fauna of the Moxos region.

Eder wrote of trees, plants and medicinal spices; mammals including the tapir, capybara, pigs, and monkeys; fish and snakes; insects including ants, spiders and scorpions; birds, turtles, and crocodiles. Within this Noah's Ark-style inventory, only three animals were allotted their own separate elongated, multi-chapter sections: snakes, crocodiles, and “tigers,” the trio of predators that he felt were most threatening to humans. Eder devoted twenty-two subchapters to the cats he called tigers, the most space given to any predator or animal in his account. He identified three different “tiger” species that roamed around the missions: the “tigre fauve,” or tawny tiger (identified by scholars as the puma or American mountain lion); the “tigre noir,” or black tiger (the panther); and the “tigre tacheté,” or spotted tiger (the jaguar). Of these three, the last one—the jaguar—is the only one that Eder singled out as a killer of humans. Montoya had referred to the human-killing capacity of jaguars when describing the incident at the reduction of Santo Tomé that opened this article. But Eder belabored it. He reported: “It is rare that a year passes without several Indians falling prey to jaguars. There is one reduction here where in a single night, this beast killed seventeen people . . . the flesh and blood of humans please it that much!”⁴⁵

Eder's ready characterization of jaguars as man-eaters would be a surprise to today's conservationists, who separate jaguars from other felids as the least likely to kill or attack humans without provocation. In Brazil in June 2008, when a jaguar killed a young fisherman who was sleeping in his tent, the national media reported it as “the first officially documented, unprovoked fatal attack of a jaguar on a human in Brazil,” whereas earlier attacks had been the result of jaguars being cornered, injured, or defending their cubs.⁴⁶ Jaguars today are listed as “opportunistic predators,” carnivores with highly variable diets that include more than eighty-five different prey species.⁴⁷ However, as Eder noted in a particularly graphic description of a jaguar taking down a horse, some of this prey could be quite large.⁴⁸ Scientists have gathered a list of possible conditions that would cause a jaguar to diverge from easier, smaller prey to attack larger animals: depletion of smaller prey; human encroachment on its habitat; or dispersal of lone jaguars outside of their normal range and into marginal, sparsely populated habitats.⁴⁹ Which of these preconditions existed in the Paraguay and Moxos missions? More pointedly, why were jaguars preying on humans?

Human encroachment and intensified human competition over small prey could have been factors in an eighteenth-century increase in jaguar attacks, but actually, at the time of establishment of the Jesuit missions, human population in this region was comparatively low. Jesuit plans for mission settlements did gather people together into larger communities than in previous decades when villages had been kept small, partly as an adaptive response to flooding.⁵⁰ But people had been living in the Amazon lowlands for centuries before the Jesuits entered that eco-zone, and in some periods, in much larger densities.⁵¹ Over the century of Jesuit presence in the missions, the population of the region actually dropped drastically due to disease epidemics,⁵² Portuguese capture of Indians as slaves, and flight and relocation of surviving Indians.⁵³

As for European immigrant populations, the Paraguay and Moxos missions were famously remote from Spanish and Portuguese colonial urban centers. The Paraguay missions were awkwardly located in between Spanish and Portuguese imperial jurisdiction.⁵⁴ To get to the Paraguay missions from Europe, Jesuits frequently transited through the Spanish port city of Buenos Aires, traveling “more than 200 leagues” or seven hundred miles down the Paraguay River to the administrative capital of the province, Asunción, which Montoya described as home to “fewer than four hundred citizens” in the mid-1600s.⁵⁵ Asunción was more than five hundred miles from the closest Jesuit reduction of Espiritu Santo, which took another three months of grueling travel to reach, involving long stretches by boat on the Paraná River interspersed with week-long overland portages around waterfalls and through swamps.⁵⁶ Other than Asunción, the significantly larger Peruvian outpost of Potosí lay more than 1,700 miles to the west of the Paraguay reductions, and the Portuguese city of São Paolo lay roughly eight hundred miles to the east.⁵⁷ Located still farther afield, the Moxos missions lay nearly two thousand miles west of the viceregal capital of Peru, Lima, a distance that took more than one year's travel by foot to traverse.⁵⁸ To the east, the Spanish settlement of Santa Cruz was closer but still three hundred miles away, requiring two months of travel to reach.⁵⁹ Nor were settler incursions into the area of the missions significant enough to threaten jaguar populations, especially when compared to today's human threat to jaguar habitat.⁶⁰ In fact, the eighteenth-century jaguar attacks might reflect that jaguar population, not human population, was on the rise. Understudied factors such as small changes in climate or alterations to other parts of the food chain may have caused a jump in jaguar numbers that left some of these predators hungry and drifting. Unfortunately there is little data available about such details for this time period.

There is one change to jaguar habitat that is documented repeatedly in the historical record for this era, however: the arrival of new, “large, meaty prey” of the sort preferred by jaguars—cattle.⁶¹ The Spanish Jesuit Cipriano Barace brought the first cattle out to the Moxos region in the late 1600s as part of a Jesuit program to encourage indigenous converts to settle in one place instead of ranging far into the mountains to hunt meat for their families as they traditionally had.⁶² In Paraguay in the 1630s, the Jesuit Montoya also explicitly mentioned the impact of new cattle populations on jaguars when he wrote, “The [jaguars] that breed in those lands are past counting because of the vast quantity of wild cattle available to them; this is so great that a cow can be purchased there for what a chicken costs here.”⁶³ Outside of the Paraguay and Moxos missions, Jesuits in the Bolivian foothills of the Andes wrote of jaguars as a threat not to humans, but to the cattle in their ranches.⁶⁴ Jaguars appear to have been just starting to learn how to hunt this new prey. Eder recorded the novelty of targeting cattle for at least one jaguar, who had an unfortunate run-in with a large bull in which the bull bested the jaguar—one of very few instances in Eder's account in which jaguars lost a confrontation with another animal.⁶⁵ Today, research shows that jaguars' taste for cattle has been finely honed since the eighteenth century, with jaguar predation on livestock now cited as the top reason for conflict between humans and jaguars.⁶⁶

Cattle meat may have been a new and preferred target for jaguars, but in the late 1760s, what Eder highlighted instead in his account of the Moxos missions were their attacks on humans. Rather than suspecting Eder of exaggeration or insidiously clever Jesuit proselytizing agenda, it is worth noting that historical tallies of predator attacks on the frontier have been taken seriously with fruitful results in recent studies.⁶⁷ Here it suffices to conclude, from Eder's report and other Jesuit records, that enough actual jaguar attacks on humans occurred in the missions of Paraguay and the Moxos to make a deep impression on the people living there. Precise numbers are not as important as the psychological impact of repeated jaguar attacks at this historic place and time. David Quammen assesses the phenomenon of human interactions with man-eating predators similarly. It is not the quantity of attacks that mattered, but the paradigm-shattering point they conveyed. “Every once in a while, a monstrous carnivore emerged like doom from a forest or river to kill someone and feed on the body,” Quammen explains. “It was a familiar sort of disaster—like auto fatalities today—that must have seemed freshly, shockingly gruesome each time, despite the familiarity. And it conveyed a certain message. Among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat.”⁶⁸

Who was potential meat for the jaguars around the Paraguay and Moxos missions, and what were they predisposed to think about jaguars? Standing alongside cattle in the jaguars' novelty food line were the Jesuits, a relatively new arrival to the missionary playing field of the Americas. The Society of Jesus was founded in the 1530s by a Basque ex-soldier, Ignatius Loyola, and its first ranks included missionaries such as Francis Xavier, whose successes in Asia brought the Jesuits widespread recognition. Following the footsteps of these giants, early Jesuits predicated their identity on a desire to be more zealous in their global outreach, more devoted to the Pope, more educated in theology, and more innovative in their evangelizing methods than older missionary orders such as the Franciscans. Their ranks grew exponentially in their first century. In 1609, when the Jesuits first arrived on the banks of the Paraná River to establish the Paraguayan missions, and certainly by 1682, when they arrived in the upper Amazon River basin to found their first mission among the Moxos, Jesuit membership was drawn from across Europe and the Americas.⁶⁹ Two of the Jesuits cited here, Antonio Ruiz de Montoya and Alonso Messia, were Spanish-speakers born and trained in Peru. François-Xavier Eder was born in Slovakia, and wrote primarily in German, Hungarian and Latin; his colleague, Martín Dobrizhoffer of Austria, was also a German-speaker who published in Latin. These men went through extensive training before being posted in teams and small groups to the Paraguayan and Moxos frontiers.

For the purpose of this analysis, what matters most is distilling from their varied backgrounds their common attitudes towards the wild beasts they were poised to encounter. Jesuits born in the seventeenth century would have been steeped in largely allegorical Catholic accounts not about jaguars specifically, but about other predatory cats such as the lion. During their novitiate, Jesuits were often read stories of martyrs to ready them for possible sacrifice in the field.⁷⁰ Scholar Ingvild Saelid Gilhus notes that what is “special” about Christian texts of the Acts of the Martyrs is that “these sources seldom allow the beasts to kill the martyrs, and [almost never give] descriptions of beasts killing Christians.”⁷¹ Gilhus does note the unpredictability of animals in general in a Christian corpus that by and large represents them as part of a “polarized cosmology” in which they are introduced as either an instrument of God, or an instrument of the Devil.⁷² For instance, in the martyrdom of Thecla, when she was thrown into the arena, she was attacked by lions and bears and even seals, but one lioness fought to its own death in order to protect her.⁷³ So some beasts could help and some could hinder.

Yet consider one of the standout accounts of near-martyrdom featuring a lion. It is from the second-century apocryphal Acts of Paul, and it is told about the apostle Paul himself. When Paul was praying in an isolated spot, he was approached by a lion who asked to be baptized by him. Later, Paul was condemned to execution by wild beasts, but the lion released into the stadium was the same one that Paul had baptized. “The lion looked at Paul, and Paul looked at the lion,” the story ran. “And borne along by faith Paul said, ‘Lion, was it you whom I baptized?’ And the lion in answer said to Paul, ‘Yes.’”⁷⁴ Jesuits who had heard this story would be open to the possibility of encountering a wild cat that might be Christian, an animal like Paul's lion, pre-ordained by God to speak to and to protect Christians. Indeed, the Jesuit Montoya prefaced his report on Paraguay by describing himself “as a desert-dweller in pursuit of wild beasts—the barbarian Indians.”⁷⁵ Consider the broadness of the category of “wild beasts” to Montoya. It could encompass the converted lion of St. Paul, the tamed lion of St. Jerome, the unconverted Guaraní, or, perhaps, real jaguars.

Also in the front lines of potential prey to jaguars, the range of indigenous peoples in the Jesuit missions of South America in the 1600s and 1700s is even more diverse and difficult to circumscribe than the cosmopolitan membership of the Jesuits. The Paraguay missions were set up as outreach to the Guaraní Indians. The Guaraní belonged to the large Tupian language grouping that included dialects spoken across much of Brazil, Bolivia, French Guiana, Paraguay and Peru, most notably the Tupí on the east coast of Brazil.⁷⁶ In spite of the distinctiveness between the dialects of Guaraní and Tupí, because they belong to the same linguistic family, anthropologists have assumed cultural affinities between the two groups. To the northeast, in the Amazon basin, the Moxos missions were established decades later among indigenous peoples of an unrelated language group, South Arawakan. Dialects of the Arawakan language family are spoken in the Upper Amazon, Bolivia, Venezuela, and as far north as the Caribbean. The Moxos Indians were the first to be approached by the Jesuits in this area, but the Jesuit missions there soon extended to include the neighboring Baure, with whom the Jesuit Eder was based. Though the Jesuits attempted to make Moxos into the lingua franca of their missions, non-Arawakan indigenous groups who moved into the Moxos reductions included Cayuvava, Itonama, Mobima, Canisania, Sironio, More-Itene, Chacobo, Chimane, Guarayo and Tapacure Indians.⁷⁷ Out of this Tower of Babel, there nonetheless loomed some consensus and traditions around a local predator well known to all of them, the jaguar.⁷⁸

Two attitudes towards the jaguar appear to have been shared by speakers of Tupian and Arawakan languages, in spite of their geographic separation and presumable cultural distinctiveness from one another: first, a reverence for the animal as a spiritual being; and second, the prominent use of the jaguar in religious rituals. Anthropologist Carlos Fausto has studied the centrality of jaguars in religious rituals among the Parakaña of western Brazil, linked by the Tupian language to the seventeenth-century Guaraní of the Paraguay missions.⁷⁹ Robin Wright has done similar ethnographic work among the present-day Baniwa of northern Brazil, connected by their Arawakan dialect to the eighteenth-century Moxos-speakers also gathered in Jesuit missions.⁸⁰ Fausto and Wright both discuss the importance of jaguars in healing and divination ceremonies of Baniwa and Parakaña shamans.⁸¹ Among both of these peoples, the most powerful and respected shamans are believed to transform into jaguars, a ritual metamorphosis shared with other cultures that have coexisted alongside wildcat populations.⁸² For the descendants of the Tupí-Guaraní, Fausto further notes a strong association between jaguars, violence, and eating raw meat, a concept that has been historically linked to the practice of cannibalism.⁸³

This article does not aim to further elucidate local indigenous understandings of the boundaries between humans and animals, though such analyses could and should be productively applied to the data collected here. For instance, in the Amazon region, there was a widespread understanding of witchcraft and rival enemy attack.⁸⁴ This indigenous sensibility has at times even been tacitly shared by Christian missionaries, who occasionally appointed former shamans as catechists or who behaved as shamans themselves in an attempt to control or temper the natural world.⁸⁵ Likewise, some indigenous peoples clearly perceived Jesuits as powerful shamans in their own right, perhaps aligning themselves with these Catholic newcomers out of genuine conviction that these new medicine men would keep them safe.⁸⁶ The convergence of indigenous and Catholic beliefs around sorcery erases distinctions between Guaraní, Moxos, Jesuit, indigenous convert, and jaguar-shaman. Yet it is a different affinity that this article purports to explore, not of overlapping human understandings of ritual roles, but of collectively experienced human-animal encounters. Jesuit records preserve instances of raw confrontations between human and animal that precede human overlay, that are understudied and that do not fit neatly into either sweeping category of “Jesuit” or “indigenous” worldview.

To illustrate the limitations of human-imposed categories, back in the mid-eighteenth century, the Jesuit Eder captured the significance of the jaguar to the indigenous peoples gathered in the Moxos missions in a way that contemporary scholars would recognize and classify as indigenous. The Moxos beliefs struck Eder as alien and inferior to his Catholic European worldview, but he reported them nonetheless:

I have already explained how the Indians add quite ignorantly to their list of arama [chiefs] the most ferocious animals, in their goal of conjuring fear and in this manner changing that terror to veneration. Furthermore, since [the jaguar] is the most ferocious of the animals and surpasses them all in dignity, the Indians consider it not simply as Arama (Chief), but as Aramamaco, which is how one says supreme Emperor.⁸⁷

A twenty-first-century scholar might privilege this sort of example for its usefulness for reconstructing early indigenous beliefs. But interestingly, asides like this are far outnumbered and overshadowed in Eder's report by vivid descriptions of attacks and sightings of actual jaguars. Jaguars themselves, not divinely or humanly propelled but present in their own right, intrude first.

II. Encounters with Jaguars

Four different Jesuit reports of jaguar encounters from the accounts of Eder and Montoya have been selected here to represent how these Jesuits might have first encountered jaguars, and how they forwarded these encounters to their readers. Eder began by painting a harrowing picture of danger from jaguars that extended into the very heart of the Christian mission settlements. “Truly, I cannot easily say how many jaguars there are in these reductions,” he fretted.

Everywhere you can find many. At night, not even the missions themselves are safe. In one of them, two Fathers were in the middle of dinner and not a single Indian had yet gone to bed, when a jaguar walked right into their dining room through one door, and left through another door to get to the meat hanging near the kitchen so that it, too, could have its meal. But once noticed, as much by the dogs as by the Indians, who ran and gathered from all sides, it suffered the punishment for its audacity.⁸⁸

Eder's appraisal of this encounter is remarkable in at least three respects. First, it is mission Catholics, not Montoya's “pagans” or “lapsed converts,” who are at risk. Second, there is an unspoken, unified response to the sudden appearance of the jaguar: Kill it. Fathers, Indians and dogs all gather to “punish” or execute the brazen intruder. Third, the confrontation is described without reference to the divine, either in the form of the Christian God or the indigenous gods. There is an immediacy and unprocessed rawness to this human-jaguar meeting that puts Catholic missionaries and indigenous neophytes (and their dogs) on the same footing.

While other missionary writings showcase the very real differences between indigenous and European beliefs and cultural responses, this particular instant, as reported by Eder, effaces difference.⁸⁹ When surprised by a jaguar on the eighteenth-century frontier, Eder catalogs a carnal, visceral, human response of self-preservation at the expense of the jaguar. This is jarring to present-day sentiment, informed as we are by the jaguar's place on the world's endangered species list.⁹⁰ But it is also jars when set against the early modern Jesuits' own depictions of this frontier as a religious battlefield where jaguars alternately symbolized either indigenous Aramamacos (the spirits of great chiefs or shamans), or the interventionist hand of the Christian God. In moments of sudden encounter, jaguars did not symbolize. They terrified.

Self-preservation was of paramount concern to Jesuits writing in the Paraguay missions as well. The second jaguar episode highlighted here is from Montoya, who appears to have reported the gritty particulars of a Guaraní Indian's run-in with a jaguar for the purpose of instructing readers on how to save themselves. “The natives have learned that [the jaguar] avoids human urine like death,” he imparted helpfully.

A tiger pursued an Indian in a forest near where I lodged. Though he shouted we could not hear him. He climbed a tree, and the tiger crouched at its foot waiting for him to come down. The Indian flung down heavy branches to drive it off, but it would not budge. He then resorted to the simple means just mentioned and the tiger instantly fled at the smell.⁹¹

The fact-gathering tone of Montoya's report resembles some of his colleagues' descriptions of bears, far to the north in Canada. There, the French Recollet missionary Chrestien LeClercq wrote of bears when he was posted to the Gaspé region on a mission from 1676 to 1688. The limited space he allotted to bears was devoted almost entirely to how Indians hunted bears, and how they might protect themselves from attack.⁹²

At the Moxos missions, Jesuits also conveyed that they looked to Indians, including children, to learn tips about what might deflect predators. The third jaguar episode featured here resembles Montoya's, only it stars two seven-year-old boys who were treed by a jaguar on their way home. One of the boys was carrying a container of powder made from pepper, and he instinctively flung the pepper directly into the eyes of the oncoming jaguar. “The boys were afraid and did not know how to save themselves, what else could they do?” Eder wrote sympathetically. He spared his readers no details about the agony that ensued for the jaguar:

The huge animal soon felt the effect [of the pepper] and descended the tree with full speed. First it rubbed its eyes with its claws, damaging them; finally it ripped its own eyes out, and stayed there in place, disconcerted. The boys climbed down and ran home where they reported what had happened. Their father returned with them to the site accompanied by dogs. They beat the trees to find the jaguar and the father killed the animal without difficulty, since it was deprived of its eyes.⁹³

Though pepper and urine figured in these cases, Jesuits stressed natural instinct as what saved these Indians' lives first and foremost--not necessarily specialized knowledge or divine protection. Indians staring down the jaguars were presented as being distant from the realm of the spiritually symbolic. In fact, they seem to have survived precisely because they did not pause for reverence or contemplative wonder at the jaguar's targeting of them.

Jesuits wrote about their own number in these same terms, underscoring the terror of jaguar encounters, and the impulsive and extreme violence required to survive. The fourth and last jaguar incident collected here features a coadjutant with the Jesuits, an architect from Bohemia, who had stepped ashore to relieve himself during his journey to the missions. “He came on land all alone carrying a rifle, which was not his habit,” Eder emphasized.

Before he had straightened up, he saw among the very dense reeds rise in front of him, completely unexpectedly, an enormous spotted jaguar that, after stretching out, fixed its gaze on him while swishing its tail, which was a bad sign. The Brother, who could have called out to the Indian rowers for help because they were barely ten steps away, forgot everything else, and did not think about anything except his survival, and pointed his rifle towards the jaguar who quickly took it between its teeth. When he saw this, the coadjutant Brother, not knowing what to do, fired: with so much success that the beast collapsed, as if struck down, even though the weapon was not loaded with anything but the small shot that we generally use for hunting birds.⁹⁴

Notably, neither Jesuit laymen nor Indians are said to have reported praying, or having time to pray, when they were staring down a jaguar. For Jesuits and the Christian subjects they privileged, this is an aberration. Consider the contrast between the descriptions of jaguar encounters above, and how one of their Jesuit contemporaries, Jérôme Lalemant, described proper Christian reactions to an earthquake in Canada on February 5, 1663. Earthquakes, like jaguar attacks, were cataclysmic natural events. Yet rather than focusing on the trauma reaction to earthquakes, the Jesuit Lalemant presented a counterpoint image of individuals whose thoughts turned to God even before their lives were in peril. Lalemant wrote of “God's special protection over our settlements.” He told of a nun in Québec, Catherine of St. Augustin, who had a premonition about the earthquake:

We have all the more reason to thank Heaven for this most loving protection, inasmuch as a person of probity and of irreproachable life felt presentiments of what afterward occurred and declared them to [her confessor]. On the very evening that this earthquake began, she had a vision of four frightful specters occupying the four quarters of the lands surrounding Quebec and shaking them violently, as if bent on overturning everything. They would undoubtedly have succeeded, had not a higher Power of venerable majesty, the ultimate source of all the disturbance and movement, opposed their efforts and prevented them from harming those whom God wished, for the sake of their own salvation, to frighten but not to destroy.⁹⁵

It was not even just the French, but also “the Indians [who] had had presentiments of this fearful earthquake,” Lalemant continued. He then presented a long deposition from a twenty-six year old Algonquin woman in which she described a voice coming to her the night before the earthquake to warn her, in advance, that the earth would tremble.⁹⁶

The difference in emphasis between the Jesuit Lalemant's earthquake anecdotes and his colleague Eder's jaguar reports was a crucial one for early modern Christians. Whether or not one had time to think of God when one was on the brink of death, before and after that peril, connecting and crediting survival to God was key. In the mindset of eighteenth-century Jesuits, one was not saved from catastrophe because one “forgot everything else, and did not think about anything except . . . survival.” One was spared because one had seen, heard, or thought of God.⁹⁷

This makes the way that some Jesuits in the Moxos and Paraguay wrote about jaguars all the more striking. Instead of presenting jaguar attacks as primarily occasions for God to intervene, some Jesuits in jaguar-threatened missions opted to preserve lived moments of trauma. For the most part, jaguars are frozen pre-parable in Jesuit records, before prayers and moralizing, in that paralyzing first moment of terror in which the animals were not allegorical, but overwhelmingly real.⁹⁸ The four episodes above, of jaguars wandering into mission towns, treeing indigenous peoples, and suffering reprisal at the hands of Indians and Jesuits alike, contrast in intensity with the handful of instances in Jesuit records in which these missionaries tried to retroactively process the presence of jaguars in Christian terms.

III. Processing Jaguars

Trauma came first and symbolism only second for Jesuits in this mission field. This section addresses how Jesuits interpolated God into jaguar attacks only after the fact; how they situated themselves relative to jaguars in local hierarchies of power; and how they described their competition, indigenous jaguar-shamans. The common ground underlying all these interpretive moves by Jesuits in the early modern Amazon is that they kept their eyes on the real jaguars described in the previous section. Jesuits linked God to actual jaguar incidents, and defined religious authority in the missions as relative to, and contingent upon, the appearance of these predators.

Eder, of the Moxos missions, always appended his reflections on jaguars after long descriptions of panicked face-to-face meetings with jaguars. For instance, he told of an older Italian Jesuit who was with a group of Moxos Indians when they stumbled across two jaguars. Everyone scrambled to climb trees to save themselves, but the Jesuit had particular difficulty, since he was elderly and did not want to let go of his rifle. In his desperation to swing up and out of the way, he grabbed what he thought was a vine, but what turned out to be a lethal snake. “Once the jaguars had left, he examined the branch from which he was hanging,” Eder narrated.

He saw then that he had seized with both hands a serpent . . . But thanks to divine Providence, he had smashed the head of this snake against the branch of the tree with his rifle, which saved him from a mortal bite. He let himself fall to the ground and jumped away [from the dead snake]. Then his fear changed into admiration and praise at the immense goodness of God. ⁹⁹

Eder added his own ex post facto layer of commentary to his report of the Italian Jesuit who belatedly credited his survival to God: “Once I read in the life of [Jesuit] Father Anchieta whom the Portuguese designate as the Saint-Francis-Xavier of Brazil, that this remarkable man had asked . . . [Christ the] Redeemer with whom he was intimate, and procured that no wrong should ever befall missionaries from any dangerous animals; daily examples demonstrate and confirm this truth.”¹⁰⁰ Here, Eder credited a venerable colleague, Anchieta, with praying successfully for protection of all Jesuits.

Eder's attitudes are consistent with those of some of his Jesuit brethren posted farther north and west, in Baja California. There, in late 1683, the Jesuit Eusebio Kino and his expedition found the body of a squirrel that had been smashed into the shape of a cross by a falling tree. Kino interpreted it as a sign from God, and named the site where they found it “La Santissima Cruz,” the Most Holy Cross, and it became a site for prayer.¹⁰¹ Both Kino and Eder saw animals as cryptic signs left by God in the natural environment in order for humans to interpret. Squirrels, snakes and jaguars could denote God's positive interventions into the world, if one knew how to read them. However, there are two small differences between Eder's processing of jaguar confrontations in the Moxos in the mid-1700s, and Kino's perceiving the sign of the cross in a squirrel in Baja California in the late 1600s. First, unlike Kino's dead squirrel (and Eder's own dead serpent), the jaguars in Eder's report were alive and active. Second, Eder jumped from the survival of one of his Jesuit associates to the assertion that all Jesuits, as a group, were exempt from execution by jaguar because they were favored by God, protected by the prayers of their very own saintly members.

Jesuits elevated both jaguars and themselves in the way that they incorporated these animals into human hierarchies. They tacitly acknowledged the unpredictable initiative of jaguars, but also singled out Jesuits as a protected elite. From Paraguay, the Jesuit Montoya generalized: “[The jaguar] seeks out the poorest meat; if there is a Spaniard, a black, and an Indian, it attacks the black first; if there are only blacks, it chooses the oldest and worst smelling.”¹⁰² By Montoya's estimation, jaguars stood slightly outside the traditional European rankings that placed Spaniards at the top, Indians in the middle, and Africans last. When jaguars intruded, they did so in a way that reinforced European and Christian privilege. His Jesuit colleague Eder concurred in a subchapter that he entitled, “The missionaries are safe up until today.”¹⁰³

On the one hand, these interpretations give the impression that Jesuits were unchanged by their encounters with jaguars. Real jaguars were compressed into symbols of elite Christian favor, reinforced by the fortuitous lack of Jesuit victims. Yet to focus on this intransigence obscures the exceptional appearance of jaguars in Jesuit hierarchies at all. With little precedent in their European experiences, some Jesuits in Paraguay and the Moxos were moved to turn jaguars into Christian symbols. They incorporated jaguars into their worldview as enforcers of Christian agenda and hierarchy. Scholars generally assign this sort of appropriation of local wildlife into the spiritual realm as being unique to indigenous peoples, not to Europeans.¹⁰⁴ But as scholar Davíd Carrasco notes, “All participants in the contact zones—including the privileged, the Europeans . . . transculturate . . . [I]t is not just the indigenous peoples, the mestizos or the mulattos who are picking and choosing from competing cultural traditions.”¹⁰⁵ Jesuits, too, were thinking with jaguars.

It was not only the Jesuits who wrestled with how to fit these predators into their schema for understanding the world, but also Christian Indians. Eder reported with some frustration how Moxos Indians residing in the Jesuit missions understood jaguars in the mid-eighteenth century. These converts also fit jaguars into a symbolic hierarchy. According to Eder, at first they did not set jaguars outside of human rankings, but put them firmly inside and ahead of humans. “Every year this beast, intent on flesh and blood, unfortunately cuts into pieces a large number of Indians,” Eder wrote.

When this happens, [the Indians] assemble all of the goods of the deceased and put them outside the door of the house so that the [jaguar], if it wants, can freely take them away. In effect, the Indians say that [the deceased's goods] belong to [the jaguar] by right of inheritance, to the point that if someone dares to take even a single item, he will be ripped to pieces by the beast, because he is guilty of the crime of lèse-majesté. Even if the wife and children of the deceased are dying of hunger, they are expected to support this belief rather than take a single kernel of corn left by the deceased. Such is the right of the jaguars!¹⁰⁶

Eder reported this as a prelude to one of his own interventions to help the widow of a man killed by a jaguar in the missions. He secretly took the food that the widow had left to the jaguar and redistributed it. It is not the purpose of this essay to evaluate Eder's action or to gauge whether he was successful in convincing the community to adopt Catholic and European views. The focus here is on the jaguar, and its poorly acknowledged impact on South American frontiers where it was widely perceived to make interventions of its own, ripping people to pieces. The historical record shows that real confrontations with jaguars such as this one, reported by Eder, were pushing both Jesuits and Moxos Indians to consider (and reconsider) this animal as a spiritual symbol. Here again, a real jaguar resisted human categorizing. Could old hierarchies and new practices stand up to unexpected jaguar takings, or did humans need to change?

Eder's account of community repercussions from a jaguar attack stands out for its lack of fit into easy Christian parable. He reported it nearly half a century after his zealous colleague, Diego de Eguiluz, reported in his 1696 annual letter that a Moxos Indian had been killed by a jaguar while hunting in the mountains. Eguiluz had noted that the man had skipped mass, “and so the [jaguar] ate him.”¹⁰⁷ He publicized the moment because that jaguar had conveniently served Christian purposes, picking off an individual who did not conform to the Catholic practices taught by the Jesuits. But Eder was faced with a jaguar that did not target a delinquent. He told of the death of an ordinary Moxos Christian convert. Eder had to tend to the Moxos Christian family that was left behind. Notably, in his after-the-fact interpretation of events, Eder reduced the jaguar from a cosmic marker of Christian triumph, to a major local player who had accrued controversial rights in human affairs. He shifted the jaguar from the outside of his previously stated hierarchy, where it had appeared elevated as an extension of God's will and the saintly Jesuit Anchieta's prayers. In this case, Eder wrote of a jaguar as uncomfortably on the inside, and he sized it up as less worthy to legal property claims than a Moxos Indian widow.

Also on the inside of Eder's daily life at the missions were indigenous jaguar-shamans, or shape-shifters. Surprisingly, jaguar-shamans appear far less often in Jesuit accounts of Paraguay and the Moxos than the jaguars themselves. Montoya and Eder both give plentiful space to the indigenous shamans of Paraguay and the Moxos, setting them up as key competitors with the Jesuits. But in Montoya's extensive seventeenth-century account of the Paraguay missions, The Spiritual Conquest, and also in Eder's multi-volume report on the Moxos missions, jaguar-shaman rituals are only described at length once by each. Before looking closely at these mentions, it is worth noting how unusual it is for these Jesuits to not make more of the association between jaguars and shamans. As noted previously, jaguars were omnipresent in the religious repertoire of many indigenous peoples of the Americas. As early as 1557, the German captive Hans Staden reported that a Tupinambá chief in Brazil was invoking the jaguar with reference to ritual cannibalism. Staden wrote that the Tupinambá leader, Cunhambebe, was eating a human leg and offered him some. When Staden refused by commenting that animals should not eat their own species, Cunhambebe exclaimed in Tupi, “Jau war sehe [Jauára ichê]”—“I am a jaguar; it tastes good.”¹⁰⁸ This is precisely the sort of conflation of jaguars with pre-Christian beliefs (cannibalism, animal transformation) that missionaries were trained to target. Indeed, missionaries among the Tupí-Guaraní peoples worked hard to write jaguars out of local spirituality and replace them with more appropriate Christian symbols, including Christ on the cross.¹⁰⁹

But both Montoya and Eder left descriptions of jaguar-shamans that complicate the image of missionaries as stamping out their opposition. The singularity of their tone is most apparent when contrasted with the writing of one of their own, the Jesuit Martín Dobrizhoffer, who served eighteen years as missionary among the Guaraní and the Abipones, a group of Guaicuruan-language speakers in the Gran Chaco plains. Dobrizhoffer published The Account of the Abipones: An Equestrian People of Paraguay in 1784 in Austria, where he resided after the expulsion of the Jesuits. The Abipones also had shamans who transformed into jaguars, and Dobrizhoffer had much to say on these “magicians, or more properly impostors, who arrogate to themselves full power of warding and inflicting disease and death, of predicting future events, of raising floods and tempests, of transforming themselves into tigers.”¹¹⁰ Dobrizhoffer wrote of a conversation he had with the Abipones about the shaman-jaguar transformation:

“You daily kill tigers in the plain,” I said, “without dread, why then should you weakly fear a false imaginary tiger [jaguar] in the town?”

“You Fathers don't understand these matters,” they reply, with a smile. “We never fear, but kill [jaguars] in the plain, because we see them. Artificial [jaguars] we do fear, because they can neither be seen nor killed by us.”¹¹¹

Given the jaguar encounters related above, Dobrizhoffer's assertion that the Abipones did not fear actual jaguars but only imagined ones seems unlikely. His dialogue seems stilted by his agenda to discredit the jaguar spirits channeled by Abipone shamans.

Montoya, writing a century earlier in Paraguay, did not separate real jaguars from divine spirits, nor did he overlook the fear caused by these flesh-and-blood predators. His single explicit mention of jaguar-shaman connection came after the jaguar attacks on Santo Tomé whose descriptions opened this article. “A number of magicians, who had cast away their magic out of fear, secretly became more pernicious than ever,” Montoya wrote. “But those instruments of divine justice, the [jaguars], returned to wreak even worse ravages . . . The people recognized their fault and implored mercy; mutinying against the magicians, they forced them to renounce their diabolical frauds.”¹¹²

Much has been written about Montoya's and other Jesuits' competition with local Guaraní shamans over which religious leader had the most power over the environment.¹¹³ But here, unlike with some of the Jesuits' other recorded showdowns with Guaraní shamans, Montoya never directly describes a public contest in which Jesuits faced off against shamans over who could best ward off jaguars.¹¹⁴ Instead he alludes indirectly and in the plural to “magicians” who, like the Jesuits and Guaraní Indians, were faced with live jaguars on the rampage. These men intensified their rituals to stave off the real jaguars, but the jaguars continued to attack. Likewise, Jesuits and Christians intensified their “prayers and petitions” as noted in Montoya's opening quote to this article. Montoya presented shamanic rituals and Christian prayers as parallel attempts to dissipate the threat. In the end, for Montoya, what moved the jaguars was not the human skills of Jesuit or Guaraní, but “divine justice,” the higher power of God himself.

It is worth repeating here that Montoya had a wealth of Christian parable at his disposal to frame this particular moment of Christians under siege by a wild beast, parable in which the Jesuit intercessionist role could have been glorified further at the expense of the shamans. One story he and his Jesuit colleagues would have known well was the popular legend of the medieval saint, Francis of Assisi (1182–1226). St. Francis famously encountered “the fierce wolf of Gubbio,” who was attacking people. He approached the wolf, calling him “Friar Wolf,” and empathizing with his hunger. He struck a deal with the animal, saying that he and the people of the city would feed it for the rest of its days if it stopped eating them. The deal apparently worked thanks to St. Francis's close connection to God.¹¹⁵ But such intervention by a holy man appears to have been far from the mind of Montoya. It is not shamans or Jesuits who are magnified in his telling, but “Heaven” and “tigers [jaguars].”

Eder was shown above to have a moment of negotiating, Francis-style, with one jaguar over the property of the man he had killed. But like Montoya, he also made no mention of the patron saint of the animals as a model for how to intercede. In his longest description of Moxos jaguar-shamans,¹¹⁶ Eder also resisted divorcing the jaguar from the realm of the real. His mention of shamanic metamorphosis came nearly a century into the Jesuits' proselytizing in the Moxos region. As his colleague Dobrizhoffer affirmed, even at that late stage, these rituals were still seen as potent by Christianized Indians. Eder described shaman-jaguar shape-shifting with condescension:

The masters of superstitions, these slaves recognized for their laziness, that they call motire [shamans] . . . knew how to procure abundant harvests thanks to the famous [jaguar]. To satiate their hunger, one of their easiest and most profitable methods consists of inventing a [jaguar] that has been driven nearly crazy from anger and violence, and that has confided that it will destroy everything and create carnage, unless very quickly people bring a remedy for its righteous rage in the form of traditional food and chicha [beer] . . . To win even more respect . . . and authority, often the motire would claw himself lightly with his nails and pull out his hair, acts that he attributed to the angered [jaguar], and he would claim that if he had not sacrificed himself spontaneously in place of all the others, the beast would have killed everyone.¹¹⁷

Like Montoya, Eder emphasized how the shamans tried to use the jaguar in order to win respect, followers, or even a basic living. They had some success in that Eder himself acknowledged the persistence of these practices, and wrote of them in the plural. His observations parallel rituals still practiced today in Brazil by indigenous peoples such as the Arara, whose shaman-transformations emphasize the aggressiveness and anger of the jaguar spirit.¹¹⁸

But again, what is most striking in Eder's report is the contrast between his tone when describing this shamanic ritual, versus his tone when describing the genuine jaguar encounters highlighted in the previous section. Jaguars were a real source of fear for Eder. The motire who ritually embodied the essence of these jaguars were not; in fact, he mocked them (as Dobrizhoffer had) by suggesting that their embodiments involved “inventing.” With his sardonic “thanks,” Eder displaced all credit for the persistence of older indigenous rituals from the shamans, and instead credited jaguars themselves with “abundant harvests.”¹¹⁹ For Eder, as for Montoya, the presence of live jaguars clearly contributed to their being a volatile fixture that could be mustered by either the shamans or the Jesuits to attract followers. Thanks to real jaguars, multiple Jesuits described an environment in which Catholic missionaries, indigenous shamans, and converts alike were having to make a new symbolic space for the animal that fell somewhere in between Jesuit and pre-Christian indigenous interpretations.

IV. Conclusion

“Maybe some of you will be surprised that I have taken on describing an animal known and perhaps already seen by many people,” the Jesuit Eder stated to introduce his chapter on jaguars. “But, because I know that there are so many fables far from the truth that are told about the tiger, by contrast I will talk about verifiable facts seen with my own eyes.”¹²⁰ Eder's insistence on “verifiable facts” was not unique to his mid-eighteenth-century vantage point. As demonstrated here, some of his Jesuit predecessors in the Moxos and in Paraguay in the seventeenth century had similarly emphasized real and observed actions of jaguars that they encountered. Without the often unnerving intrusions of these animals, Christianity and shamanism would have played out very differently on these frontiers.

Consider the counterpoint of the Tupí-Guaraní of Brazil. Scholar Carlos Fausto has analyzed the changes to their religion resulting from the mix of Christianity and earlier indigenous views. Today among the Christianized Tupí-Guaraní, Fausto finds what he calls a “desjaguarificaçao”—a “dejaguarization,” or sapping of blood out of their religious beliefs.¹²¹ Many of their religious rituals have removed the focus on blood sacrifice that existed pre-encounter in both Tupí-Guaraní practice (in which it was represented by jaguars), and in Catholic belief (in which it was represented exclusively by the crucified Christ). In order to find a middle ground of agreement between two contrasting denoters of blood sacrifice, the symbol of the jaguar fell by the wayside in Christian-Tupí-Guaraní practice in the late 1800s.

But around 1700, the middle ground in the Paraguay and Moxos Jesuit missions looked quite different because of the adamantly non-symbolic third party affecting the outcome: real man-eating jaguars. Their presence precipitated what looks more like a “jaguarization” than a “dejaguarization” of Catholic-Guaraní and Catholic-Moxos devotion.¹²² If one can presume a modus operandi for jaguar behavior as it appears in this limited window of the historical record, it was to ignore and thus undermine any human attempt to contain them, either literally or symbolically. Jesuits, Guaraní, Moxos and the many indigenous peoples in the Paraguay and Moxos missions showed impressive consensus in approaching live jaguars. As Jesuit records show, they reacted self-protectively and violently to jaguar attack; they also agreed that jaguar intrusions were fearsome signs from a superhuman realm, though they may have disagreed about which realm and what the signs meant. But jaguars were not part of this consensus. They agreed to nothing. These animals kept the high-stakes game for souls interesting and plausible on this frontier precisely because they seemed to be participating, but they were not following human rules. Jaguars deserve to be written back into the history of Christianity for the real complexity and ambiguity they brought to the American mission field, and for reminding us of “all these possible small, unpredictable perturbations with large effects” on the human past.¹²³