¹ Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest Accomplished by the Religious of the Society of Jesus in the Provinces of Paraguay, Paraná, Uruguay and Tape [1639], trans. C. J. McNaspy, S.J. (St. Louis, Mo.: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1993), 158.

² Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 159.

³ Anthropologist Carlos Fausto, for instance, concludes on the basis of the writing of Jesuit Martín Dobrizhoffer that: “For the [Jesuit] missionaries, the shamans' ability to transform themselves into the feline stood as evidence of their intimate rapport with the devil, the Great Transformer.” Carlos Fausto, “A Blend of Blood and Tobacco: Shamans and Jaguars among the Parakaña of Eastern Amazonia,” in In Darkness and Secrecy: The Anthropology of Assault Sorcery and Witchcraft in Amazonia, ed. Neil L. Whitehead and Robin Wright (Durham, N.C.: Duke University, 2004), 158.

⁴ Don, Patricia Lopes, “Franciscans, Indian Sorcerers, and the Inquisition in New Spain, 1536–1543,” Journal of World History 17, no. 1 (March 2006): 44CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Witnesses claimed that he could transform into a “tiger” (jaguar), lion (puma), or dog.

⁵ Don, “Franciscans,” 34.

⁶ Don, “Franciscans,” 37. She refers to the testimonies of Cristóbal Cisneros, a Spanish encomendero from Texcoco, and another Spanish settler, Pedro de Meneses, who both testified about Martin Ocelotl's “probable communion with the devil” and “satanic powers.”

⁷ Don writes that Ocelotl was “spreading an innovative philosophy that was potentially much more dangerous to the Christian mission than even the friars realized.” (39). The danger lay in his deliberate positioning of himself as “a center of alternative thinking to Catholicism” (43). Historian Louise Burkhart makes a similar assessment of Ocelotl as not simply reverting to pre-Christian Nahua beliefs, but creating a new, explicitly anti-Christian ideology. Louise M. Burkhart, The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona, 1989), 140.

⁸ Carrasco, Davíd, “Borderlands and ‘Biblical Hurricane’: Images and Stories of Latin American Rhythms of Life,” The Harvard Theological Review 101, no. 3/4 (July–October 2008): 362–363CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ Munro S. Edmonson, trans. and ed., The Ancient Future of the Itza: The Book of Chilam Balam of Tizimin (Austin: University of Texas, 1982), 44–45, ll. 813–844. Mérida was the Mayan administrative capital for the province of Chakan.

¹⁰ Carrasco, “Borderlands,” 363.

¹¹ He continues eloquently: “They were theological correlatives of local fauna.” David Quammen, Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2004), 7.

¹² Dombek, Kristin, “Murder in the Theme Park: Evangelical Animals and the End of the World,” The Drama Review 51, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 140CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In her study on early Christianity, Ingvild Saevild Gilhus also notes an “allegorical trend, which turned animals into signs” (270). As a result of this trend, animals “fade as real creatures [and] rise again in a ‘supra-bestial’ form . . . on the metaphorical level, ‘the wild animals’ were again and again conquered by the martyrs.” Ingvild Saelid Gilhus, Animals, Gods and Humans: Changing Attitudes to Animals in Greek, Roman and Early Christian Ideas (New York: Routledge, 2006), 204.

¹³ See, for instance, Paul Waldau and Kimberley Patton, ed., A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science and Ethics (New York: Columbia University, 2006).

¹⁴ Laura Hobgood-Oster, Holy Dogs and Asses: Animals in the Christian Tradition (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2008), 15.

¹⁵ William B. Taylor, “Santiago's Horse: Christianity and Colonial Indian Resistance in the Heartland of New Spain,” in Violence, Resistance, and Survival in the Americas: Native Americans and the Legacy of Conquest, ed. William B. Taylor and Franklin Pease G. Y. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1994), 158.

¹⁶ Taylor, “Santiago's Horse,” 157.

¹⁷ “What happened when the horse reached what is today Argentina and Uruguay is best described as a biological explosion: horses running free on the grassy vastness propagated in a manner similar to the smallpox virus in the salubrious environment of Indian bodies.” Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1972), 84. Also: Elinor G. K. Melville, A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico (New York: Cambridge University, 1994). Melville goes so far as to say: “It is clear, moreover, that although European-like landscapes did not develop in the hinterlands of Latin America's high civilizations, the biological status quo was not maintained either. The indigenous species of the New World did not triumph over the invaders as in Asia, where the Europeans and their animals and plants barely gained a foothold” (2).

¹⁸ “Estan tan instruidos en el aprecio de la Salvacion, y cuidan tanto de esto, q en qualquier ausencia q ayan de haser del Pueblo, se confiesan primero; viniendo a la Yglesia a prevenirse con los sacramentos de la confesion y communion para emprender con esta seguridad el viage; y para librarse de los peligros, o contingencias, q pueden ofrecerse en los caminos, q de ordinario son por montes y campos despoblados, donde habitan Tigres, fieras sangrientas y crueles, q son el pavor de espanto de toda esta tierra.” Alonso Messia, S. J. Relación of the Moxos Missions [1713]. Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu [ARSI], Peru 21 (Peruana Historia Tomo III 1633–1700), f. 178v.

¹⁹ William M. Denevan, The Aboriginal Cultural Geography of the Llanos de Mojos of Bolivia. (Berkeley: University of California, 1966), 45.

²⁰ As part of a plan to preserve jaguar populations, the organization Panthera is currently trying to create a “jaguar corridor” that would safely allow passage to ninety distinct jaguar populations across 182 separate corridors and eighteen nations, in an effort to encourage enough breeding to save the declining species. Jaguars will wander hundreds of miles to breed. Sharon Guynup, “The Jaguar Freeway,” Smithsonian Magazine (October 2011), http://www.smithsonianmag.com/ science-nature/the-jaguar-freeway-73586097/?no-ist=&utm_campaign=2011-October&page=1.

²¹ Bart J. Harmsen, Rebecca J. Foster, Scott C. Silver, Linde E. T. Ostro and C. Patrick Doncaster, “The Ecology of Jaguars in the Cockscomb Basin Wildlife Sanctuary, Belize,” in Biology and Conservation of Wild Felids, ed. David W. Macdonald and Andrew Loveridge (New York: Oxford University, 2010), 408.

²² Laura Redish and Orrin Lewis, “Native American Jaguar Mythology,” Native Languages of the Americas (1998–2015), http://www.native-languages.org/legends-jaguar.htm.

²³ The Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) painted at least one tiger hunt that was owned by a French collector, Jean de Julienne, and that was used by seventeenth-century painters Charles Parrocel, Louis Desplaces and Nicolas Lancret to compose a series of exotic hunt paintings commissioned by King Louis XV of France. It was Louis XV's hunting gallery that inspired Tempesta. In terms of realism, Parrocel's and Desplaces's tigers were represented as large spotted cats that actually resemble jaguars or leopards more than tigers proper. Lancret's tiger is depicted realistically. Hazlehurst, F. Hamilton, “The Wild Beasts Pursued: The Petite Galerie of Louis XV at Versailles,” The Art Bulletin 66, no. 2 (June 1984): 227–228CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁴ Schrader, J. L., “A Medieval Bestiary,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 44, no. 1 (Summer 1986): 14–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also Nickel, Helmut, “Presents to Princes: A Bestiary of Strange and Wondrous Beasts, Once Known, Forgotten, and Rediscovered,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 26 (1991): 137n18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁵ Acheson, Katherine, “The Picture of Nature: Seventeenth-Century Aesop's Fables,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 9, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2009): 31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁶ For instance, in Persia in 1672, a Safavid artist, Mu'in Musavvir, painted “Tiger Attacking a Youth,” a realistic and horrifying illustration of a recent incident in the artist Musavvir's life in which a Siberian tiger, given as a gift to the Shah of Isfahan, tore off half the face of a young grocer's assistant who was a bystander. Farhad, Massumeh, “An Artist's Impression: Mu'in Mussavir's ‘Tiger Attacking a Youth,’” Muqarnas 9 (1992): 116–123CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Such journalistic-type drawings were less common in Europe, though in the seventeenth century there was a growing market for accurate depictions of exotic flora and fauna of the New World in particular. Linda Kalof, Looking at Animals in Human History (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2007), 72–75 on curiosity cabinets; 119–121 on the handful of European menageries that were open to the public in the seventeenth century.

²⁷ “There were also brought there all the castes of birds and animals that could be found, and as the inhabitants of the land knew [Maurits's] condition and appetite, each one brought the bird, or the strange animal which he could find in the interior, there they brought parrots, araras, jacis, canindés, jaboris, mutuns, Guinea fowl, ducks, swans, peacocks, turkeys and chickens [in] great number, so many pigeons, that one couldn't count them, there they had tigers, the onça [the jaguar], the suçuarana, the tamanduá, the búgio, the quati, the saguim, the apeteá, Cape Verde goats, Angolan sheep, the cuita, the paca, the anta, the wild pig, a great multitude of rabbits, and finally there was no curious thing in Brazil that they did not have there, because the inhabitants sent them with good will.” Manuel Calado, O Valoroso Lucideno [1648], as quoted in da Silva, Maria Angélica and Alcides, Melissa Mota, “Collecting and Framing the Wilderness: The Garden of Johan Maurits (1605–79) in North-East Brazil,” Garden History 30, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 167CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁸ Live tigers also appear to have been less common than live lions in the stocking of the Roman gladitorial games; in fact, even ancient Romans were more likely to run across exotic animal products such as lion skins or elephant tusks than the animals themselves. Epplet, Christopher, “The Capture of Animals by the Roman Military,” Greece and Rome 48, no. 2 (October 2001): 210–222CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also: Parker, Grant, “Ex Oriente Luxuria: Indian Commodities and Roman Experience,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 45, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 51CrossRefGoogle Scholar. And: Cuttler, Charles D., “Exotics in Post-Medieval European Art: Giraffes and Centaurs,” Artibus et Historiae 12, no. 23 (1991: 161CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁹ In 1475, the Duchess of Savoy in Turin kept a live tiger, the first recorded one since Roman times; there was a surge in exotic imports in the seventeenth century, when a tiger was notably unloaded in Amsterdam in July of 1633 with much publicity. But these cases were still rare and centered on cities and ports. Cuttler, “Exotics,” 161, 170.

³⁰ Ringmar, Erik, “Audience for a Giraffe: European Expansionism and the Quest for the Exotic,” Journal of World History 17, no. 4 (December 2006): 381CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³¹ Cuttler, “Exotics,” 161.

³² St. Mark's association with the winged lion is derived from a Biblical verse about a prophetic vision of the apocalypse, Revelation 4:7: “The first living creature was like a lion, the second was like an ox, the third had a face like a man, the fourth was like a flying eagle.” These creatures have been taken as symbols of the four evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

³³ Kalof, Looking at Animals, 46–47.

³⁴ Dominic Alexander, Saints and Animals in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2008), 18. Alexander includes the examples of a late-antique Egyptian hermit who tried to get himself killed by a lion in remorse for a sin, but the lion refused to kill him, thus showing the hermit that God had forgiven him. He also references a monk of Sapsas who was so favored by God that he was able to welcome lions into his cave (20). It should also be noted, however, that lions in the Bible occasionally also denoted the devil, as in I Peter 5:8: “your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about” (24–25).

³⁵ Alexander, Saints and Animals, 21. The second-century apocryphal Acts of Paul also related a similar story of Thecla, who was saved by a lioness who jumped to protect her from other beasts in the arena (24), and Paul the hermit, whose grave was dug by solicitous lions who emerged from the wilderness for this sacred purpose (35).

³⁶ Kalof argues that what was distinctive to the Renaissance (1400–1600) and Enlightenment (1600–1800) periods, in contrast to the earlier Medieval period, was “the penchant for realistic representation of animals,” supported by European exploration, the printing press, and the emergence of science. Kalof, Looking at Animals, 72.

³⁷ Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 34.

³⁸ Eder's attention to jaguar skins foreshadows the intensified trade in jaguar skins in the eighteenth century, though it is not clear from Eder's account whether Moxos Indians were contributing to this trade by hunting jaguars. Felix Azara, an eighteenth-century Spaniard, tallied two thousand jaguars killed annually in the La Plata River Valley in Argentina. But the trade in jaguar pelts was widespread even earlier, with the Inca of Peru using jaguar skins as official emblems and uniforms for warriors, and Aztec high-ranking nobles and warriors also wearing them ceremonially, to such an extent that the trade in them may have contributed to the near-extermination of jaguars in Mexico and Central America in pre-Colombian times; genetic research indicates that the population of Central American jaguars was restored by an influx of jaguars from South America. Alan Rabinowitz, An Indomitable Beast: The Remarkable Journey of the Jaguar (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2014), 45–6, 62, 64.

³⁹ “Par ailleurs, les jaguars sont beaucoup plus grands que ce que laisseraient croire les peaux qui sont aujourd'hui mises sur les chevaux de course; c'est pourqoui je pense que ces dernières proviennent d'Afrique, ou si c'est du Brésil ou d'une autre region d'Amérique, cela prouve que là-bas les jaguars sont sûrement plus petits que ceux du Pérou [le territoire de l'actuelle Bolivie..où vivait le Père Eder].” François-Xavier Eder, Missionnaire en Amazonie: Récit du dix-huitième siècle d'un jésuite au Pérou, en Bolivie et dans les réductions indiennes [1791], trans. Joseph Laure (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2009), 203.

⁴⁰ Ghelfi, Barbara and Abromaitis, Michael J., “Letters,” Master Drawings 42, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 179Google Scholar. Tiger skin saddle blankets were also part of the kit of medieval Japanese cavalry in the fourteenth century, though these would have been far from Eder's purview. Conlan, Thomas, “Review of Armed Martial Arts of Japan: Swordsmanship and Archery, by G. Cameron Hurst,” Monumenta Nipponica 54, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 164CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴¹ This reference is from Borges's 1946 short story, “El Muerto.” See: Carter, E. D. Jr., “Women in the Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges,” Pacific Coast Philology 14 (October 1979): 14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴² Notably, Tempesta's seventeenth-century engravings of lion hunts show “leopard-skin covering” on horses involved in the hunt. Hazlehurst, “The Wild Beasts Pursued,” 230, fig. 15.

⁴³ In 1631, when Montoya was serving as superior to these missions, he relocated twelve thousand Guaraní Indians down the Paranapanemá River to escape raids from slavers from São Paolo, Brazil. Clement McNaspy, S. J., “Montoya's Life,” in Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 15, 18; for Montoya's own account of this exodus: 104–113.

⁴⁴ He spent most of that time in the reduction of San Martin de Baures, one of the more remote settlements. Eder, Missionnaire en Amazonie, 10–11.

⁴⁵ “Il est rare que passe une année sans que quelques Indiens ne soient la proie du jaguar. Il y a une reduction dans laquelle, en une seule nuit, ce fauve tua dix-sept personnes. Mais le pire est qu'après avoir goûté, ne serait-ce qu'une fois, à l'homme, le jaguar délaisse tous les autres animaux, même s'il les a à sa portée et qu'il est sur le point de mourir de faim. Car la chair et le sang humains lui plaisent tant!” Eder, Missionnaire en Amazonie, 205.

⁴⁶ Sandra M. C. Cavalcanti, Silvio Marchini, Alexndra Zimmerman, Eric M. Gese, and David W. Macdonald, “Jaguars, Livestock, and People in Brazil: Realities and Perceptions Behind the Conflict,” in Biology and Conservation of Wild Felids, ed. David W. Macdonald and Andrew Loveridge (New York: Oxford University, 2010), 395.

⁴⁷ These species mostly include peccaries, deer, large rodents, armadillos, and coatis, but they also target cattle weighing up to 200 kilograms. Harmsen et al., “The Ecology of Jaguars,” 412.

⁴⁸ “Un jaguar avait tué un cheval bien nourri, qui servait son maître depuis déjà de nombreuses années. Et comme ce n’était pas très loin de la mission, le fauve, craignant pour sa vie, décida d'emporter sa proie dans un endroit plus sûr. De l'autre côté du fleuve, il y avait un bosquet, à environ mille pas (à peu près 1 400 mètres) de ce dernier. Donc, en plantant les griffes d'une de ses pattes dans le cheval, le jaguar entreprit le chemin vers le fleuve qui êtait proche, en traînant ainsi sa proie. À l'endroit où il arriva, après avoir traverse à la nage le fleuve, la rive avait sept ou huit verges (environ 6 à 7 mètres) de haut et était si abrupte que tu aurais cru qu'un chien n'aurait pu la gravir qu'avec peine. Or le fauve, s'accrochant avec trois pattes et tirant sa proie avec la quatrième, non seulement arriva au sommet, mais ensuite parcourut l'espace jusqu'au bosquet, puis arrivé là il mangea le cheval.” Eder, Missionnaire en Amazonie, 205. Eder also records cases of jaguars breaking cows' necks (204) and defeating crocodiles (205).

⁴⁹ Andrew J. Loveridge, Sonam W. Wang, Laurence G. Frank, and John Seidensticker, “People and Wild Felids: Conservation of Cats and Management of Conflicts,” in Biology and Conservation of Wild Felids, ed. David W. Macdonald and Andrew Loveridge (New York: Oxford University, 2010), 175–176.

⁵⁰ For instance, the earliest mission settlement among the Moxos, Loreto, had an estimated population of 6,000 in the late 1690s, versus the smaller villages of one to two hundred people that the Jesuits found when they made their first entries to this region. On pre-Jesuit Moxos settlement patterns, see: David Block, Mission Culture on the Upper Amazon: Native Tradition, Jesuit Enterprise, & Secular Policy in Moxos, 1660–1880 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1994), 26. For the population of the Loreto mission, estimated by a visiting friar, see: 1698 Relation authentica Fr. Francisco de Torres ex ordine Praedicatorum do Statu nostrarum Missionum de los Moxos, ARSI Peru 21, ff. 113v-114v.

⁵¹ Between 300 and 800 A.D., archaeologists estimate that the population of the Moxos region peaked at 350,000, more than ten times higher than the population sustained there at the height of the Jesuit mission period, c. 1700. The ancestors of the Moxos Indians were able to sustain this permanent population through terraplaning the landscape and digging drainage canals to stave off the effects of flooding. Ricardo Céspedes Paz, “Moxos: Un esplenderoso pasado,” in Los Bolivianos en el Tiempo, ed. Alberto Crespo, José Crespo Fernández, and María Luisa Kent Solares (La Paz, Bolivia: Instituto de Estudios Andinos y Amazónicos, 1995), 51.

⁵² Using Jesuit tallies of converted Christian populations in the region, the approximate population of people settled across the Jesuit missions of the Moxos was at its highest at 35,000 in 1737, but had dropped to 20,000 people six decades later, by 1797. These people were dispersed across twenty-five mission towns. For Jesuit population tallies, see: Ramón Gutierrez da Costa and Rodrigo Gutiérrez Viñuales, “Territorio, Urbanismo y Arquitectura en Moxos y Chiquitos,” in Las Misiones Jesuíticas de Chiquitos, ed. Pedro Querejazu (La Paz, Bolivia: Fundacion BHN, 1995), 331. David Block gives a much more conservative estimate of a stable, mean population of around 11,500 at the six first mission settlements over the early 1700s. Block, Mission Culture, 83–84.

⁵³ Carlos Fausto, Warfare and Shamanism in Amazonia (New York: Cambridge University, 2012), 19, 21n5, 22.

⁵⁴ When the Spanish and Portuguese clarified the border in the Treaty of Limits of 1750, the Jesuit missions were forced to move to remain under Spanish protection. The anger of the Indians at this decision led to their resistance in the Guaraní Wars of the 1750s. The sympathy of Jesuits who loudly voiced their disapproval led indirectly to the Jesuits being expelled from Portuguese and Spanish dominions in 1759 and 1767, respectively.

⁵⁵ Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 30.

⁵⁶ Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 38.

⁵⁷ Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 35.

⁵⁸ Block, Mission Culture, 110–111. In 1717–1718, the overland trek from Lima to the Moxos region took about fourteen months. One had to cross the coastal desert, ascend the western Andes, traverse the high plain and descend again through tropical forest to reach the savanna where the Moxos missions were located.

⁵⁹ Travel was so grueling that one Jesuit layman, José del Castillo, died in 1688 trying to find an easier connecting route between the Moxos missions and Cochabamba, the closest Spanish settlement to the north. Gutiérrez & Gutiérrez, “Territorio,” 345.

⁶⁰ The high growth rate of human populations is cited as a reason for jaguar population decline today in Chiapas, Mexico, and in western Brazil. Nashieli Garcia-Alaniz, Eduardo Jorge Naranjo and Frank F. Mallory, “Human-Felid Interactions in Three Mestizo Communities of the Selva Lacandona, Chiapas, Mexico: Benefits, Conflicts and Traditional Uses of Species,” Human Ecology 38, no. 3 (June 2010): 451–457. Also: de Azevedo, Fernando Cesar Cascelli and Murray, Dennis L., “Evaluation of Potential Factors Predisposing Livestock to Predation by Jaguars,” The Journal of Wildlife Management 71, no. 7 (September 2007): 2379–2386CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶¹ Rabinowitz, An Indomitable Beast, 185.

⁶² Barace herded two hundred animals including cows, mules and horses from the town of Santa Cruz to the Moxos mission of Trinidad, a four-hundred-kilometer trek that took them fifty-four days; only eighty-six animals survived the journey, but this was enough to begin stock-breeding in the region. Barace was honored for his cattle-herding feat with a 1986 commemorative postage stamp in Bolivia. See: Peter Fennessy, S.J., “Father Cipriano Barace, SJ,” Jesuit Stamps (2015), http://www.manresa-sj.org/stamps/1_Barace.htm. On the impact of Barace's livestock, see: Massimo Livi Bacci, El Dorado in the Marshes: Gold, Slaves and Souls Between the Andes and the Amazon (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2010), 137. Cattle ranching flourished outside the missions as well, especially in the grasslands of eastern Amazonia; see: Fausto, Warfare and Shamanism, 23.

⁶³ Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 34.

⁶⁴ “Nadie posee [esta propiedad ‘La Coca’] por estar muy distante del Pueblo [Samaipata] que no se compone sino de montañas y peñascos, y un hormiguero de tierras como es de tigres, onzas y otros insectos venenosos por lo que se halla despoblada y desamparada.” Juan Saavedra contra José Padilla [c. 1640], Archivo y Biblioteca Nacionales de Bolivia [ABNB] EC1811.43, F30, f. 9v. Also in Bolivia, the Society of Jesus inventories list a property bordering the Guapay River that they called “Estancia del Tigre” because of the “tigres” or jaguars that frequently attacked the cattle there. See: La Compañía de Jesus, sobre el reconocimiento de la medida y composicíon de unas tierras en Tomina [c. 1640], ABNB EC1665.30, F90. Special thanks to Nathan Weaver Olson in the Department of History at the University of Minnesota for these references.

⁶⁵ “Les taureaux sont les seuls que ce fauve n'ose pas attaquer, à moins qu'ils ne soient couches par terre. Et à son tour le taureu est le seul à ne pas fuir à la vue du jaguar et à ne montrer aucune marque de peur. Au contraire, il continue à paître derrière le fauve en mugissant et en grattant le sol avec sa patte. Un jour, on découvrit un taureau qui s'était jeté avec tant de violence sur un jaguar, qu'il le transportait transpercé et mort sur ses cornes, jusqu’à ce que des Indiens le délivrent de son si glorieux fardeau.” Eder, Missionnaire en Amazonie, 204. Jaguar expert Alan Rabinowitz reports that because jaguar prefer larger prey, it is fairly common for them to be caused injury by their targeted dinners, including peccaries, tapirs or caimans. Rabinowitz, An Indomitable Beast, 185. But in European artwork in the seventeenth century, actually, lions attacking bulls where a popular motif in art, occasionally conveying political messages, but emphasizing with vivid and gruesome detail the lion's triumph over the bull. See, for instance, a bronze statue, “Lion Attacking a Bull,” attributed to either Antonio Susini (1572–1624) or Giovanni Francesco Susini (c. 1585-c. 1653). Kalof, Looking at Animals, 110–111.

⁶⁶ In a 2010 study of Brazil's southern Pantanal, 46% of jaguar kills were found to be cattle (Cavalcanti et al., “Jaguars, Livestock and People,” 389). Still, as compared to other felids such as tigers, leopards, lions, lynx, puma and cheetah, Loveridge et al. show jaguars to be among the least likely to target cattle. Yet recently in southern Amazonia, Brazil, in a single year, ranchers paid professional predator hunters to kill 110–150 jaguars and pumas to address the perceived threat to their livestock. Loveridge et al., “People and Wild Felids,” 169 table 6.1, 164.

⁶⁷ “The expedition encountered many kinds of wildlife, but the grizzlies were the most dangerous and frightening . . . As a result, the members of the expedition were especially alert to the presence of grizzlies, and we can believe that their reports of these bears were quite accurate.” Daniel B. Botkin, “Thirty-Seven Grizzly Bears in the Wilderness: Knowing What's There, When, and How Many,” in Daniel B. Botkin, Our Natural History: The Lessons of Lewis and Clark (New York: Oxford University, 2004), 61. Two remote sensing scientists have corroborated Botkin's interpretation in their study, where they refined his measure of grizzly bear density and also used Lewis and Clark's journals to assess the influence of humans on nine other mammals that they wrote of often (their prey): white-tailed deer, elk, bison, pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep, grizzly bear, black bear, wolf, and beaver. See: Laliberte, Andrea S. and Ripple, William J., “Wildlife Encounters by Lewis & Clark: A Spatial Analysis of Interactions between Native Americans and Wildlife,” BioScience 53:10 (October 2003): 994–1003CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Special thanks to Patrick Nunnally at the University of Minnesota's River Life Program for calling my attention to these studies.

⁶⁸ Quammen, Monster of God, 3.

⁶⁹ The first of thirty reductions that the Jesuits established in Paraguay was San Ignacio Guazú, officially founded in 1609. In the Moxos, the first of twenty-five reductions was Loreto, founded in 1682. On the multilingual, pan-imperial and international membership of the Jesuits, see: Luke Clossey, Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (New York: Cambridge University, 2011), especially 33–37 regarding “which Jesuits were German?”

⁷⁰ Trent Pomplun notes that during the training of aspiring Jesuits, after dinner Jesuit novices were nightly read lives of the ancient martyrs and letters about present-day martyrs from the field, creating something of a “collective fantasy” for overseas mission postings and also martyrdom. Trent Pomplun, Jesuit on the Roof of the World: Ippolito Desideri's Mission to Tibet (New York: Oxford University, 2009), 18, 22.

⁷¹ Ingvild Saelid Gilhus, Animals, Gods and Humans: Changing Attitudes to Animals in Greek, Roman and Early Christian Ideas (New York: Routledge, 2006), 184.

⁷² Gilhus, Animals, Gods and Humans, 191.

⁷³ Gilhus, Animals, Gods and Humans, 192–193.

⁷⁴ Hobgood-Oster, Holy Dogs and Asses, 53.

⁷⁵ Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 29.

⁷⁶ On the Tupí-Guaraní “ethos of partnership” with Europeans and their sixteenth- and seventeenth-century “conquest and expansion” along the Rio de la Plata in the Amazon, see: M. Kittiya Lee, “Language and Conquest: Tupí-Guaraní Expansion in the European Colonization of Brazil and Amazonia,” in Iberian Imperialism and Language Evolution in Latin America, ed. Salikoko S. Mufwene (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2014), 144, 154. Also on how the Jesuits tended to minimize the affinity between Tupí and Guaraní groups to favor the Guaraní with whom they mostly worked, see: Fausto, Carlos, “Se Deus Fosse Jaguar: Canibalismo e Cristianismo entre os Guarani (Séculos XVI-XX),” Mana 11, no. 2 (2005): 387CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 407n2.

⁷⁷ In 1680, in their first assessments of the area, the Jesuits tallied six thousand Moxos Indians scattered across seventy villages ranging between sixty and two hundred people. Métraux, Alfred, “The Social Organization and Religion of the Mojo and Manasi,” Primitive Man 16, no. 1 (January-April, 1943): 6–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For other indigenous groups served by these missions, see: Block, Mission Culture, 16–18; 38 for the Chiquitos missions, which were sometimes grouped with the Moxos missions, though I focus on the Moxos settlements here. In 1711, Jesuit Diego Ignacio Fernández noted seven different languages being spoken in these Jesuit settlements in addition to Moxos. “Diego Ignacio Fernández to P. General Michelangelo Tamburini, 21 Sept. 1711,” ARSI Peru 21a, f. 125v.

⁷⁸ The similarities between indigenous practices throughout the range of the jaguars has led jaguar expert Alan Rabinowitz to define a “Jaguar Cultural Corridor” that links “the people of the jaguar, all those whose lives from the Pleistocene onward were shaped by the apex predator . . . The similarities and continuity of practices and beliefs relating to the jaguar that existed among diverse civilizations, separated in space and time, seemed part of a larger cultural consciousness that was as powerful and evocative as the animal itself.” (An Indomitable Beast, 32) Anthropologist Carlos Fausto is more specific about the cultural practice that tied together diverse indigenous groups across the jaguar's range: “if one concept cutting across geographic, linguistic and cultural boundaries among South American Indians can be singled out, it is that of qualitative identity between jaguars and shamans and accordingly their interchangeability of form.” Carlos Fausto, “A Blend of Blood and Tobacco: Shamans and Jaguars among the Parakaña of Eastern Amazonia,” in In Darkness and Secrecy, 158–159.

⁷⁹ Carlos Fausto, Warfare and Shamanism in Amazonia (New York: Cambridge University, 2012).

⁸⁰ Robin M. Wright, Mysteries of the Jaguar Shamans of the Northwest Amazon (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2013).

⁸¹ Fausto says of the Parakaña shamans today: “Metamorphosis into a jaguar is an interspecies cross-dressing (a transvestment) that implies the acquisiton of the animal's dispositions and capacities . . . Those who transvest are dangerous, since they can act as the predator for real. . .the main purpose of the allomorphy [is] to feed oneself by acquiring the feline's capacity to hunt” (Warfare and Shamanism, 208–209). Wright notes that the Baniwa have a category of “jaguar shaman” distinguished from other shamans by a decade of training and the ability to transform into a jaguar spirit, which he describes in Mysteries of the Jaguar Shamans, 8–12, 13.

⁸² Wright also notes shamanic metamorphosis into jaguars among the Guahibo of the Vichada River in Colombia; he also cites jaguar ceremonies involving jaguar bone trumpets and the demon-god Kuwai as spreading from the Arawakan peoples to the eastern Tukanoan-speaking societies of the northwest Amazon (Mysteries of the Jaguar Shamans, 98, 22). Fausto finds similar jaguar traditions among the Asurini and Araweté, two other Tupí-Guaraní groups (Warfare and Shamanism, 224–225). Jaguar transformations have also been studied today among the Brazilian indigenous groups the Kulina and the Arara, though Quammen argues that invocations of felid spirits and shape-shifting with wildcats also occur with other species on other continents, including among the Kerinci of west-central Sumatra (the tiger), and in the eastern Congo (the leopard): see Monster of God, 8. For the Kulina in Brazil, Pollock notes that jaguars embody an exaggerated form of male gender: Donald Pollock, “Siblings and Sorcerers: The Paradox of Kinship among the Kulina,” in In Darkness and Secrecy, 203–204 on “dori”. For the Arara of Brazil, see: Márnio Teixeira-Pinto, “Being Alone amid Others: Sorcery and Morality among the Arara, Carib, Brazil,” in In Darkness and Secrecy, 215–243.

⁸³ The karowara, or spirits that shamans extract from jaguars in dreams, are described by Fausto as: “pathogenic objects controlled by shamans, with no autonomous volition but rather only a compulsion to eat human flesh.” Fausto, “A Blend of Blood and Tobacco,” 161. Also, Fausto, Warfare and Shamanism, 224.

⁸⁴ See, for instance, In Darkness and Secrecy: The Anthropology of Assault Sorcery and Witchcraft in Amazonia, ed. Neil L. Whitehead and Robin Wright (Durham, N.C.: Duke University, 2004).

⁸⁵ On the convergent roles and identities of Christian missionaries and shamans, see Susan Neylan, “Shamans, Missionaries and Prophets: Comparative Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Religious Encounters in British Columbia.” Historical Papers (1994). On one Jesuit who was himself disciplined for behaving too much like an indigenous shaman, see Charlotte De Castelnau-L'Estoile, “The Uses of Shamanism: Evangelizing Strategies and Missionary Models in Seventeenth-Century Brazil,” in The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences and the Arts, 1540–1773, ed. John O'Malley, G. A. Bailey, Steven Harris, and T. Frank Kennedy (Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Toronto, 2006), 616–637.

⁸⁶ The Jesuit Montoya tells of a Guaraní shaman, Ñeçu, who began to hold baptisms in the style of Catholic priests as a way to consolidate his own power. Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 201–202.

⁸⁷ “J'ai déjà raconté comment les Indiens ajoutèrent tout bêtement dans la liste des arama les animaux les plus féroces, dans le but d'en conjurer leur peur et de cette façon change leur crainte en veneration. De plus comme le tigre est le plus féroce des animaux et qu'il les dépasse tous en dignité, c'est pourquoi les Indiens le considèraient non pas comme Arama (Chef) mais comme Aramamaco, c'est comme si tu disais Empereur supreme.” Eder, Missionnaire en Amazonie, 139.

⁸⁸ “Vraiment, je ne pourrai pas dire facilement combien de jaguars il y a dans les réductions. Partout tu en trouves plusieurs. De nuit, les missions elles-mêmes ne sont pas sûres. Dans l'une d'entre elles, deux Pères étaient en train de souper et aucun Indien ne s'était encore couché, quand un jaguar entra dans leur salle à manger par une porte, en ressortit par l'autre et se dirigea vers la viande suspendue près de la cuisine pour avoir lui aussi son repas. Mais aperçu, tant par les chiens que par les Indiens, accourus ensemble de tous côtés, il subit le châtiment de son audace.” Eder, Missionnaire en Amazonie, 202–203.

⁸⁹ Inga Clendinnen notes the tension in trying to describe religion in zones of encounter where sometimes it seems that there is a “creative mixing of divergent traditions,” but at others “[we are faced with] the inexactibility of a profoundly different way of conceptualizing the world and man's place within it.” This tension is not a simple byproduct of twentieth-century historians' categories like “syncretism,” but it is visible in some early records such as the Jesuit Eder's, in which he fixates on similarity seemingly without any cognitive dissonance. See: Clendinnen, Inga, “Ways to the Sacred: Reconstructing ‘Religion’ in Sixteenth-Century Mexico,” History and Anthropology 5 (1990): 109CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹⁰ Interestingly, twenty-first-century jaguar conservationist Alan Rabinowitz associates some of this violence against jaguars with religious practices over time: “The jaguar, with its power, ferocity, and valor, was of man's world, yet outside of man's world; it was a strong, secretive animal of the dark, dense forest, linked to the spirit world, godly but not God. God (or gods) empowered man to chase, wound, and even kill this favored species when necessary, despite its otherworldly status.” Rabinowitz, An Indomitable Beast, 37.

⁹¹ Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 34.

⁹² “If he does not bring it down, the Bear embraces him, and will very soon have torn him to pieces with its claws,” LeClercq reported, prefacing his survival tips for European newcomers to that forest. He continued: “But the Indian to escape this throws himself face down upon the ground. The Bear smells him, and if the man does not stir, the Bear turns him over and places its nose upon his mouth to find if he is breathing. If it does not smell the breath, it places its bottom on the [man's] belly, crushes him as much as it can . . . if it perceives that the man breathes it will press him like that until it believes it has suffocated him . . . To guard against this, it is necessary to take good care neither to breathe nor to move until it is far off.” Father Chrestien LeClercq, “The Hunting of Moose, of Bears, of Beavers, of Lynxes, and other animals according to their seasons,” in Rethinking the Fur Trade: Cultures of Exchange in an Atlantic World, ed. Susan Sleeper-Smith (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2009), 21.

⁹³ “Je ne peux pas omettre de raconteur l'histoire admirable d'un jaguar et de deux enfants d’à peine sept ans. Leur père les avait envoyés dans un jardin potager pas très loin de leur habitation, pour y rapporter de piment fort qui avait été réduit en poudre là-bas. Sur le chemin de retour, ces enfants, ayant vu dans un buisson un jaguar, montèrent dans un arbre pour le fuir. Le fauve les poursuivit; mais au sommet de l'arbre ils lui échappèrent. Même en allongeant ses pattes, le jaguar ne pouvait pas arriver jusque là pour les atteindre et les déloger. Comme les petits garçons avaient peur et ne savaient pas comment se sauver, que pouvaient-ils faire? Alors, avec le petit recipient contenant le piment, celui qui le portrait, essaya instinctivement de repousser le fauve. Pendant qu'il le faisait, par Bonheur, le vase s'ouvrit, et le piment en poudre commença à tomber dans les yeux du jaguar. Le gros animal en ressentit aussitôt l'effet et descendit à toute vitesse de l'arbre. Alors, il se frotta d'abord les yeux avec ses griffes, puis les endommagea; enfin il se les arracha lui-même et déconcerté demeura sur place. Les enfants descendirent en catimini et revenus chez eux racontèrent ce qui s'était passé. Leur père repartit avec eux, accompagné de chiens. Ils battirent les arbres pour retrouver le jaguar et le père tua sans difficulté l'animal privé de ses yeux.” Eder, Missionnaire en Amazonie, 210.

⁹⁴ “Le premier arriva à un Frère coadjuteur de Bohème, architecte remarquable, qui naviguait sur un fleuve pour accomplir sa tâche d'une mission à l'autre. Il demanda aux rameurs indiens de le deposer sur la rive. Il descendit tout seul emportant un fusil, ce qui n’était pas dans ses habitudes. Pour faire ses besoins il marcha quelques pas dans les roseaux sans se démunir de son arme; cependant, comme lui-même le confirma, sans avoir réfléchi à bien emporter ce fusil et à l'avoir toujours à portée de main. Or, avant de se redresser, il vit parmi les roseaux très denses et de façon tout à fait inattendue, se lever devant lui un énorme jaguar tacheté qui, après s'être étiré, le fixa en remuant la queue, ce qui est mauvais signe. Le Frère qui aurait pu appeler au secours les rameurs indiens qui étaient à peine à dix pas, oubliant tout le reste, ne songea qu’à sa survie et pointa son fusil vers le jaguar qui le prit aussitôt entre ses dents. Quand il vit cela, le Frère coadjuteur, ne sachant que faire, tira: avec tant de success que le fauve s'affaissa, comme foudroyé, bien que l'arme ne fût chargée qu'avec du petit plomb que nous utilisons généralement pour chasser les oiseaux.” Eder, Missionnaire en Amazonie, 212.

⁹⁵ Jérôme Lalemant, “Universal Earthquake in Canada and Its Marvelous Effects [1662–1663],” in The Jesuit Relations: Natives and Missionaries in Seventeenth-Century North America, ed. Allan Greer (New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000), 129.

⁹⁶ Lalemant, “Universal Earthquake,” 130.

⁹⁷ Contemporaries of the Jesuits, Puritan clergy in North America, made this particularly explicit in sermons that they wrote in response to earthquakes in the 1720s. After a particularly strong 1727 earthquake in New England, Puritan leaders delivered sermons that instructed the survivors who poured into church that “God's primary purpose in an earthquake is to terrify man into an awakened state of repentance and reformation.” Peter Rumsey describes these sermons as indicating a change, in the eighteenth century, from emphasizing theory and Providence, to using catastrophic events as “an effective rhetorical means of persuading their congregations to prepare themselves for life in the next world,” and he sees it as foreshadowing the broader Atlantic “Great Awakening” with mini-awakenings or renewals of devotion. Peter Lockwood Rumsey, Acts of God and the People, 1620–1730 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research, 1986), 6, 121.

⁹⁸ For another animal, the eagle, the Jesuit Jérôme Lalemant also stressed the contrast between parables or stories, and the terrifying reality of frontier encounter. He described an eagle attack on a boy in the Canada missions around 1647: “What the poets have invented about the abduction of [the Trojan youth] Ganymede [by the god Zeus] has a basis in the boldness of eagles. Not long ago, one of those great birds swooped down on a little nine-year-old boy. It placed one of its feet on his shoulder and seized him by the opposite ear with the talons of the other. When the poor child began to cry out, his little three-year-old brother took a stick and tried to strike the eagle, but it would not let go. Still, this did perhaps prevent it from tearing the child's eyes and face with its beak and gave the father time to come to his assistance. When the bird heard the noise of human voices, it appeared somewhat surprised but did not release its prey. The father came running and had to break its thigh. Fortunately, he had a sickle in his hand, so that when the eagle felt itself wounded and tried to fly away, he was able to cut off its head. The Indians say that eagles quite often attack men and that they sometimes carry off beavers and sturgeons heavier than sheep. This seems to me unlikely. Some say that these are griffins and claim that the latter have been seen in these countries. I merely relate what I have heard.” See: Jérôme Lalemant, “Various Matters [1647–1648],” in The Jesuit Relations: Natives and Missionaries, 122–123.

⁹⁹ “Le second exemple est ce qui arriva à un Père italien, cousin germain maternel du défunt pape Clément XIII, qui poursuivait des Indiens fugitifs. Le missionnaire, également muni d'un fusil, justement pour sa protection et celle de ses compagnons de voyage, suivait un sentier avec quelques Indiens quant, à toute vitesse, surgirent sur le même chemin deux jaguars, probablement en train de se bagarrer et de se poursuivre l'un l'autre. Aussitôt les Indiens se dispèrserent, mais comme le Père, déjà âgé, ne pouvait pas monter à un arbre, il rechercha une branche à laquelle il pourrait se suspendre à l'aide de ses bras. Il en vit une mais, pour avoir les mains plus libres, il aurait dû se défaire de son fusil, or il le prit d'une main et, en sautant, il attrapa la branche, puis en relevant le plus possible ses jambs, il laissa la voie libre aux jaguars. Cependant le missionaire sentit je ne sais quoi de mou sous ses mains. Comme les jaguars s'étaient déjà éloignés, il examina la branche à laquelle il était suspend. Il vit alors qu'il avait saisi des deux mains un serpent qui était allongé sur la branche et que les Espagnols appellant serpiente de cascabel [Crotalus durissus], c'est-à-dire serpent à sonnettes avec lesquelles il émet un son. Cependant, grâce à la Providence divine, il avait écrasé sans le savoir la tête du crotale contre la branche de l'arbre avec la détente de son arme, ce qui le sauva d'une morsure mortelle. Il se laissa tomber à terre en sautant de là-haut. Alors sa frayeur se changea en admiration et en louanges à l'immense Bonté divine.” Eder, Missionnaire en Amazonie, 212–213.

¹⁰⁰ “Jadis j'ai lu dans la vie du Père Anchieta, que les Portugais désignent comme le saint-François-Xavier du Brésil, que cet homme remarquable avait demandé, parmi plusieurs autre choses, au Rédempteur dont il était intime, et obtenu qu'aucun mal ne soit fait à aucun missionnaire par tous ces animaux dangereux; des exemples quotidiens démontrent et confirme la réalité de cela.” Eder, Missionnaire en Amazonie, 212–213.

¹⁰¹ “El paraxe y passo de la Ssa. Cruz tomo esta denominacion de lo que ayer milagrosamente sucedio al tiempo que derribaron un cordon seco pues al tiempo que cayo al suelo se aplasto una ardilla y formo con dicho tronco una cruz como si a proposito y con las manos se huvien echo y se puso y venero y quedo de aquella manera.” 1683 Relación of the second Jesuit expedition to California, ARSI Mexicana 17, f. 521.

¹⁰² Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 34.

¹⁰³ Eder marveled about “the mark of favor, the divine protection that . . . has benefitted the Jesuit missionaries in all of America . . . So many Indians, with whom we live and spend our days and take long voyages, die each year, but no missionaries . . . who have not until present suffered any of the damages caused by wild beasts, in the missions where I have lived or elsewhere . . . Les missionnaires saufs jusqu'a ce jour / Je ne peux pas passer sous silence la faveur insigne de la protection divine, dont, comme on peut le constater, ont bénéficié les missionaires jésuits dans toute l'Amérique. Il est connu de par le monde combien ils ont oeuvré ici: en consequence, combien et dans quelles conditions ils ont dû entreprendre de voyages, pénétrer des forêts, parcourir de savanes, traverser de fleuves et de lacs, et tout ceci au milieu de tigres, de scorpions, de serpents mortels, de crocodiles, d'araignées et de bien d'autres animaux ou insects, dont la morsure vous ôte la vie en quelques instants. Et alors que tant d'Indiens, avec qui nous vivons, passons nos journées, entreprenons de longs voyages, meurent chaque année, par contre aucun des missionnaires, dont les demeures et les autres facilities sont identiques ou même moindres que celles dont jouissent les Indiens, n'a jusqu’à present souffert de dommages causes par les bêtes sauvages, que ce soit dans les missions où j'ai vécu ou ailleurs. Bien plus, il n’était pas rare qu'il arrivât des événements si extraordinaires que même les Indiens, pourtant si stupides, s'en émerveillent et du coup leur estime pour les Pères augmenta.” Eder, Missionnaire en Amazonie, 211–212.

¹⁰⁴ For instance, anthropologist Carlos Fausto, who delves into the multiplicity and complexity of indigenous perspectives on jaguars, reduces all European missionaries into a single monolithic bloc that uniformly believed that jaguars indicated the devil. Fausto, “A Blend of Blood and Tobacco,” 158.

¹⁰⁵ Carrasco, “Borderlands,” 361.

¹⁰⁶ “Tous les ans ce fauve, très avide de chair et de sang, met malheureusement en pièces un grand nombre d'Indiens. Lorsque cela arrive, on rassemble toutes les affaires du défunt et chaque nuit on les met devant la porte de sa maison pour que le tigre, s'il le désire, puisse les emporter librement. En effet, les Indiens dissent qu'elles lui appartiennent toutes par droit d'héritage, au point que si quelqu'un osait en dérober ne serait qu'une toute petite partie, il serait mis en pièces par le fauve, car coupable d'un très grand crime de lèse-majesté. Même si l’épouse et les enfants du défunt mouraient de faim, ils devaient supporter cette croyance plûtot que prendre un seul grain de maïs laissé par le disparu. Ainsi l'ordonnait en effet le droit des tigres!” Eder, Missionnaire en Amazonie, 139–140.

¹⁰⁷ “Asi que se lo comió el tigre . . .” Diego de Eguiluz, S.J., 1696, Relación de la Mission apostólica de los Moxos en esta Provincia del Peru de la Compañía de Jesus. ARSI Peru 21, ff. 60–60v. Eguiluz's report about the Moxos strongly resembles a report from Paraguay in 1639 by Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, who wrote: “An irreligious youth always avoided going to Mass, even on days when the Church requires it. He was a stumbling block to the others, taking them into the forest. One feast day, overcome by a strong temptation, he took another fellow out with him and would not let him go back for Mass. The following day, also a feast day, he again wanted to keep him away. However, his companion, regretting the day he had missed, decided to make this one and so left him. He had gone but a few steps when he heard his tempter screaming for help. Turning to look, he saw him in the clutches of a fierce tiger which was furiously rending him to pieces. He fled from the peril and told what had happened. The people came and discovered that a good part of him had already been eaten by the tiger—a manifest punishment, and example to the rest.” Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 148.

¹⁰⁸ M. Kittiya Lee notes that Staden spent nine years as prisoner of war in the Tupinambá clans around Bertioga and San Vicente, and “the extensive linguistic content of Staden's work reflects the fluency that he attained.” Lee, “Language and Conquest, 150–151. See too: Eve M. Duffy and Alida C. Metcalf, The Return of Hans Staden: A Go-between in the Atlantic World (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 67. See also Fausto, “A Blend of Blood and Tobacco,” 159.

¹⁰⁹ Fausto. “Se Deus Fosse Jaguar,” 385–418.

¹¹⁰ Dobrizhoffer as quoted by Fausto, “A Blend of Blood and Tobacco,” 158.

¹¹¹ Fausto also notes the contrast between Dobrizhoffer and other Jesuits such as Montoya, commenting that “the Jesuits oscillated between considering the shamans' powers a mere imposture or an effective demoniacal force.” Fausto, “A Blend of Blood and Tobacco,” 173n2.

¹¹² Montoya, The Spiritual Conquest, 158–159.

¹¹³ Rain, bones and journeys seem to be the three most prominently contested registers of spiritual authority for Jesuits and Guaraní shamans; jaguars are not often mentioned in these studies. Dot Tuer, “Old Bones and Beautiful Words: The Spiritual Contestation between Shaman and Jesuit in the Guaraní Missions,” in Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas, 1500–1800, ed. Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff (New York: Routledge, 2003), 77–97.

¹¹⁴ Jesuits were often quite forthright about their participation in showdowns with shamans. The Jesuit Francisco Pinto, for instance, related how he publicly prayed and called for rain with some success, leading the Tupian-speaking Indians of the Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil to view him as “Master of Rain.” His assuming of blurred roles that led him to seem like a “missionary who became a shaman-prophet” eventually led to his being pulled from the mission field except for in emergency peace-keeping situations such as the one that led to his death. Castelnau-L'Estoile, “The Uses of Shamanism,” 621, 626.

¹¹⁵ Kalof, Looking at Animals, 68. The absence of Jesuit comparisons between jaguars and wolves is as strange as the Jesuits' omitting comparisons between jaguars and lions. Wolves were recognized local predators in much of northern Europe, where Europeans (including Christians) had a long popular tradition of “were-wolves”—humans transformed into wolves, or channeling wolf spirits—that has been compared to South American indigenous practices of jaguar-shape-shifting. Rabinowitz, An Indomitable Beast, 37; Fausto, “A Blend of Blood and Tobacco,” 171; Wright, Mysteries of the Jaguar Shamans, 243. On European werewolves, see: Darren Oldridge, Strange Histories: The trial of the pig, the walking dead, and other matters of fact from the medieval and Renaissance worlds (London: Routledge, 2007), 96–105.

¹¹⁶ Eder does briefly allude to shamans transforming into jaguars (and other creatures) at one earlier point in his account, when he writes of shamans: “J'ai decouvert des indices sérieux qui prouvent qu'intervint un certain commerce avec le démon. Ainsi, ceux, dont la tâche était de conserver en mémoire toutes les sortes de superstitions, en ajoutaient de nouvelles, les répandaient ou encourageaient: on les appelle motire [chaman, devin, sorcier, guérisseur] qui sont assez nombreux parmi tous les peuples des réductions, meme s'ils n'ont peut-être pas partout été repérés, à cause de leur application et de leurs tentatives pour taire et cacher leurs secrets au missionaire . . . c'est vrai que la plupart des hommes et des femmes qui aimaient ce genre de vie étaient âgés. De plus, pour que quelqu'un soit considéré comme motire, il suffisait qu'il declare avoir parlé chez lui ou hors de chez lui avec un tigre, avec un crocodrile ou beaucoup mieux avec un achane [esprit, génie].” Eder, Missionnaire en Amazonie, 134.

¹¹⁷ “Les maîtres en superstitions, ces esclaves reconnus de la paresse, que l'on appelle motire, comme je l'ai déjà dit, surent se procurer d'abondantes récoltes grâce a ce fameux tigre. Pour calmer leur faim, un de leurs moyens, parmi d'autres, des plus faciles et des plus rentables, consiste à inventer qu'un tigre, rendu presque fou par la colère et la violence, lui a confié qu'ill allait faire un carnage et tout détruire, à moins qu'au plus vite l'on ne porte remède à sa juste colère par les plat habituels et de la chichi . . . Ensuite, entièrement dans le noir, avec des flutes de pan prêtes pour cela, le motire appelle le tigre pour un repas d'alliance et de réconciliation. Enfin, il annonce qu le fauve vient d'arriver, laissant les autres livides de peur et s'attendant à la mort. Mais, cependant, quand ils entendent le motire sortir de la maison et declarer que le tigre s'est déjà entièrement calmé . . . alors ils commencent aussitôt à reprendre vie et satisfaits parlent à voix basse, persuadés que dorévanant ils n'ont plus rien à craindre du fauve . . . pour gagner encore plus de respect de la part des siens et d'autorité sur eux, souvent le motire lui-même se griffe légèrement partout avec ses ongles et s'arrache des cheveux, actes qu'ill atribue à un tigre en colère et il pretend que s'il ne s'était pas sacrifié spontanément à la place des autres, le fauve aurait tué tout le monde. Ainsi, il parvient à être dorévanant considéré par tous comme une victim du people et une personne vénérée et consacrée du tigre, à qui personne n'osera facilement s'opposer, meme en parole, quand il demandera les festins coutumiers.” Eder, Missionnaire en Amazonie, 140–141.

¹¹⁸ “Aggressiveness, violence, and predation, which are what a jaguar epitomizes as the natural precondition of the world, must not be allowed to exist among living relatives: everything in Arara social life is explicitly thought and done to avoid and remove the hazards of untempered behaviors that can prolong misfortunes among the living . . . [A bad jaguar spirit's] very presence among the living proclaims that hostility, anger, and belligerence are intrinsic qualities of this world, and it demands immediate shamanic action . . . Being solitary and, above all, a predator, a jaguar is the paramount embodiment of what should not constitute the rules, values, and ways of behaving among living people.” Teixeira-Pinto, “Being Alone amid Others,” 236–237. Interestingly, Eder's description also sounds like a ritual reported by Montoya that featured a “devil” that sounds suspiciously like a jaguar spirit. Montoya told of a shaman, Taubici, who “when he wanted to talk to the devil” ordered everyone out of house and took part of the roof off for evil spirits to be allowed entrance. Then Taubici had fits with women holding him up as he made wild faces and gestures as he prophesied about future events. Tuer, “Old Bones and Beautiful Words,” 87n38.

¹¹⁹ Like the Jesuit Eder invoking “harvests” spurred by jaguars, puritans used the word “harvest” to describe those who were moved to renew their protestant faith after catastrophic earthquakes. Rumsey, Acts of God and the People, 140–141.

¹²⁰ “Peut-être, quelques-uns seront surprise que je me charge de decrire un animal si connu et même déjà vu par beaucoup de gens. Mais, parce que je sais qu'au sujet du tigre on raconte beaucoup de fables éloignées de la vérité et qu'en revanche on ne parle pas d'autres faits, tous véridiques et vus de mes propres yeux, qui, je pense, intéresseront beaucoup le lecteur, je veux donc en parler à part et amplement.” Eder, Missionnaire en Amazonie, 201. Eder's observation that “many fables far from the truth” were told about jaguars seems oddly prescient of the assessment of today's world expert on jaguars, Alan Rabinowitz, who writes, “Often feared not for what it was, but for what it was believed to be, jaguars inspired a universal awe and dread that was predominantly of a mystical nature, the fear of an animal possessed of supernatural powers and only partly of this earth.” Rabinowitz, An Indomitable Beast, 36–37.

¹²¹ Fausto, “Se Deus Fosse Jaguar,” 396.

¹²² Fausto notes that the Parakaña of Brazil also appear to have undergone a “jaguarization” of beliefs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, due to different sociopolitical experiences than the Guaraní. Fausto, Warfare and Shamanism, 224–225.

¹²³ Alan de Queiroz, The Monkey's Voyage: How Improbable Journeys Shaped the History of Life (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 302.