The Great Divide

by Peter Watson

  Chocolate beer (chichi) was enjoyed from very early on; in fact this may have been the original use. According to some anthropologists it was employed in non-hierarchical societies to create social debt, ‘binding people in asymmetrical social relations’. And, possibly, it was the development of beer that caused the appearance of spouted bottles with flaring necks (a process that perhaps parallels the development of pottery to manipulate maize beer, and also liquids in Europe, which so fascinated Andrew Sherratt – see above, chapters 8 and 10). Condiments may have been added at the time of serving and pots, specially prepared, were smashed after use, adding to the drama of the drinking event, especially for guests, in a potlatch-type ceremony.27

  Cacao played a part in religion – symbolising fertility and sustenance, sacrifice and regeneration, embodiment and transformation – and was pan-Mesoamerican in scope. The maize god is sometimes shown with cacao pods studded on his skin. The corn cycle was the central metaphor of life and death for the Maya, but humans, maize and cacao all featured, cacao perhaps representing the underworld.28 The World Tree – that ancient shamanistic feature – is sometimes the cacao tree, cacao being the most privileged fruit grown from the maize god’s body, showing its position in cosmology as second only to maize (maize was also added to cacao drinks).29

  The maize god died each year, when part of his spirit left his body and rose to the heavens. His body was believed to be buried in ‘Sustenance Mountain’ where it gave birth (out of sight) to the fruits of the earth – cacao first and then other plants. This meant that even one sip of a cacao drink was a sacramental act.

  Wealth was measured in cacao pods (as shown in inscriptions) and, in later times it was used as money. Sophie and Michael Coe give the value of various products in terms of cacao beans: a good turkey hen = 100 full cacao beans; a large axolotl (a salamander, a delicacy) = 4; a hare = 100; an avocado, newly picked = 3; a slave = 100; the services of a prostitute = 8–10.30 They also could be used to pay for a service done, and even to buy one’s way out of forced labour.

  There were, of course, many other words for cacao, as there were for maize but there seems to have been an intimate association between iximte (maize) and kakaw, signifying that they were worshipped together.

  The drink was prepared by pouring from a great height, so as to produce a foam on the top, which was regarded as the greatest delicacy, the aroma being as important as the taste. The best cacao-drinking vessels were very fine and made of volcanic ash temper; this volcanic link also had religious significance.

  Many vessels with caffeine have been found in tombs in Copan. No other substances, other than cacao, are known to possess caffeine. In this area cacao and stone beads were exchanged for salt and cloth. In the Late Classic period (AD 600–800) there was a dramatic increase in the visibility of cacao – for example, it was depicted on stone censers placed in front of temples. Elsewhere cacao pod adornments on pots accompany jaguar gods and diving gods. Many of the censers were intentionally broken as part of a cancellation ritual in honour of deceased rulers. Cacao pods, the jaguar and the underworld are clearly linked.31

  ‘Tree crops represent a long-term investment in the land that may tie kin groups to a specific area in ways that maize produced through slash-and-burn agriculture does not.’32 To begin with only elites were allowed to own cacao orchards though this changed later. The Itźá Maya, an ethnic group based in the north of the Yucatan peninsula, were at the centre of a trade network based on cacao, which they exchanged for feathers, jaguar pelts, slaves and tortoise-shell spoons used to sip the froth of the cacao. They also controlled vanilla and achiote, both flavourings. El Salvador was famous for its production of cacao.33

  Soconusco (part of the Mexican state of Chiapas, on the Pacific coast) was ideally suited to the production of cacao, maybe from 900 BC on. By AD 1200 they had access to long-distance trade goods, presumably as a result of well-developed production of cacao (the Aztecs conquered the area partly to have more reliable sources). Cacao was part of the tribute it paid, and in the sixteenth century about 1.5 million cacao trees were under cultivation. Only maize is more ubiquitous in ceremonial offerings.34

  There was, then, a substantial difference between the important plants of the American tropics as compared with Eurasia. In the latter, the grasses (cereals) spread rapidly, aided by the east-west configuration of the landmass, and by the development of the plough and the rest of the traction/secondary products complex. In the New World tropics most of the plants were rooted to one environment, certainly to begin with and for some time after, whether that environment was the rain-forest or the mountains, and they did not travel as much or as well as the Eurasian cereals. The lack of pack animals (save for the Andes) also inhibited movement generally.

  As we have seen, the presence of domesticated large mammals in the Old World helped to promote a divorce by early peoples there from intensely psychoactive substances. Dispersed pastoral societies, spread more thinly and not grouped into villages or towns, were by necessity more individualistic, coming together intermittently for the advantages that occasional communal solidarity could supply (marriage, defence, attack) and in these circumstances the milder and shared euphoriant properties of alcohol were more suitable than the far more intense and private properties of hallucinogens.

  In the New World tropical civilisations – more vegetal, less animal-oriented – it so happened that psychoactive substances were, literally speaking, thicker on the ground than in Eurasia. These psychoactive properties of New World plants were also far more varied than in the Old World, ranging from the intense (and sometimes dangerous) Datura, to coca, tobacco and cacao, whose differing effects together created the idea that there was/is a separate realm (even more than one realm) to which access was achieved – uniquely but reliably – by ingestion of these sacred substances. Few, if any, of them were taken recreationally, underlining the fact that early people’s association with psychoactive plant life in the Americas was much more formal and intense than in the Old World.

  In Eurasia, plants were not without religious significance but it was the concept of fertility itself that dominated worship, naturally enough because of the weakening monsoon. In the New World, on the other hand, the plants themselves were gods, often gods to be feared, conferring on the people who consumed them altered states of consciousness, states that were also to be feared at times, as well as being instructive. In some ways, this meant that New World peoples had, or felt they had, a much more vivid and certain experience of divinity – and other realms of divinity – than did peoples in the Old World. Life in the New World was, therefore, and to this point, both more static and more intensely ‘other worldly/religious’ than in Eurasia.

  Whereas in Eurasia alcohol helped shape civilisation, in the Americas hallucinogens had much more impact. In the New World the existence of a supernatural world was altogether more convincing.

  • 14 •

  WILD: THE JAGUAR, THE BISON, THE SALMON

  In the South and Central American tropical rainforest, some native Indians believe that certain trees attract particular forms of game. This has never been established scientifically but what is clear is that the dominant animal in these areas, throughout prehistory and until recently, was a carnivorous mammal, the jaguar. In North America, by contrast, the dominant animal was a herbivorous mammal, the bison. Though these animals were very different, as we shall see, they had in common the fact that both were wild, not domesticated. This was an important difference between the Old World and the New.1

  The jaguar is the third largest cat on earth and the largest in the New World.2 It is also the dominant predator in the tropical forest, occupying the top slot in the food chain: the forest belongs to the jaguar more than it belongs to man. Notably solitary, it usually stalks its prey alone and at night. ‘The victim is brought to the ground by the awesome feet, claws and mighty forearms, and is dispatched by a bite from the extremely well developed canines on the neck or throat.’3
Moreover, the jaguar is equally at home swimming in water or climbing trees. This means that in some ways the jaguar and man in the jungle are very alike – they tend to hunt the same animals. In fact, for many tribes in the Amazon region men and jaguars are so alike that shamans are thought to regularly transform themselves into jaguars, or they are regarded as originally being jaguars. In several small statues in the Dumbarton Oaks collection of Olmec art in Washington DC, humans are depicted that appear to be in the process of turning into jaguars – either their hands are claws or their faces are beginning to take on the snarling jaws of an aggressive feline (see figure 11).

  Although jaguars and other felines (such as the puma and the ocelot) are not found everywhere, they do range – in art and in religious contexts – from the north of Argentina to the Gulf of Mexico coast to the south-western tip of California (Panther Cave in Texas dates to between 6000 and 2000 BC). In many of these areas the jaguar is the most prevalent symbol of ritual.4 They are generally shown with snarling mouths and prominent fangs or canine teeth. Sometimes they are shown attacking humans, occasionally copulating with them. Jaguars are associated with water, rain (its roar is regarded as a form of thunder, indicating the anger of the gods), with the jungle, with darkness and with caves – they are the lords of the underworld. For many tribes, the jaguar is the ‘Master of the Animals’ and controls the non-human world. In a small number of cases of South or Central American art, jaguars are shown licking hallucinogenic vines. All of this confirms an intimate relationship between early man and the jaguar, one based on fear, respect, and with one of the shaman’s main responsibilities being to tame this ferocious creature, a practice that recalls Jacques Cauvin’s point about the bull in the Old World representing the untameable forces of nature.

  Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, of the Instituto Colombiano de Antropología, in Bogotá, has carried out the most thorough studies of jaguar symbolism in South and Central America and he has demonstrated how, at San Augustín, on the headwaters of the Magdalena River, there is to be found the greatest number of large stone statues in any prehistoric context in the western hemisphere.5 Mainly located on hilltops and mountain slopes, these statues were both ceremonial and funerary and the great majority are feline. Moreover, apart from one or two, which show jaguars in a more or less naturalistic crouching position, the others – the majority – show a monstrous being, half-man, half-jaguar, with human bodies and what Reichel-Dolmatoff calls ‘bestial’ mouths with fangs.6 A second group of statues shows a jaguar in the act of overpowering a smaller figure which represents a human being. In some cases the jaguar is copulating with a woman (figure 10).

  Local ethnographic information, also collected by Reichel-Dolmatoff among the Chibka-speaking Páez Indians, who conserve many traits of the ancient belief systems, credit the origins of the Páez with the rape of a young woman by a jaguar, resulting in the ‘thunder-child’. Thunder is a central element in Páez life, associated with the jaguar spirit, the concept of fertility and with shamanism (the shaman receives the supernatural call to office from thunder). Reichel-Dolmatoff has found many parallels of this set of myths in South and Central America: the Olmec had a similar legend, of a new race coming into being after the rape of a woman by a jaguar; the Caribs of the Orinoco Plain traced their descent from mythical jaguars; as do the Kogi of the Sierra Nevada and several groups of Tukano in the northwest Amazon. In contrast, such groups as the Arawak, Chocó and Makú, who claim to be descended from other animals, or from caves or rocks, live in terror of those peoples who are said to be of jaguar origin. In particular, they fear that their women will be abducted by men from the jaguar-peoples, perhaps a folk-memory of a real event in the past, and a reminder of the importance of exogamy.7

  Fig. 10 Monument 4 from Chalcatzingo, showing two stylised felines attacking two human figures, each of whom has a typically deformed Olmec head (see also chapter 17).

  This is reinforced by ideas that the jaguar is never the progenitor of all of the human race, only parts of it, and by beliefs among the Sierra Nevada Indians, who were divided into jaguar and puma clans whose male members had to marry women of the deer or peccary clans. These clans were held to be intrinsically ‘female’ because these animals comprised ‘the natural foods of jaguars’. Crossing an area traditionally occupied by jaguar-people can cause disease in others not indigenous to the locality. The jaguar has to attack in order to survive and these qualities are regarded as characteristically male. ‘The Indians also point out that the jaguar is a great hunter and that this activity implies a strong erotic element, the act of hunting being equated with a form of courting the game animals.’8 This reverberates with earlier shamanistic ideas, discussed in chapter 3, about hunting as a form of ‘seduction’.

  The complex of beliefs that surround the jaguar – caves, thunder, rain, fertility, sexual aggression – also constitutes, according to Reichel-Dolmatoff, ‘the principal sphere of action of most shamanistic practices’. Jaguars are helpers of the shamans, who can turn into jaguars at will, sometimes to achieve beneficent ends (such as curing disease), sometimes to threaten or kill enemies or rivals. Eventually, after death, the shaman turns permanently into a jaguar. In some tribes the word for jaguar and for shaman are the same, derived from a term for cohabitation.9

  There is a further level of belief – the jaguar gets his bright colour from the sun in the east, that colour being the symbol of creation and growth. He is associated with rock crystal, particles of which are regarded as thunderbolts and are found where lightning has struck. Jaguar motifs form a large part of the imagery these tribes experience when under the influence of hallucinogens, and shamans in trance may wear crowns of jaguar claws. The drugs themselves are also equated to jaguar sperm or jaguar seed. Narcotic snuffs are kept in tubes made of (sacred) jaguar bones. In trance, the shaman ‘talks to the jaguar’.10

  The headwaters of the three greatest rivers in South America – the Magdalena, the Orinoco and the Rio Negro, a major tributary of the Amazon – all rise within about 160 miles of each other and it is there that the symbolism of the jaguar is at its purest. Nonetheless, it is also incorporated into the more developed religions of the Mochica, Olmec, Chavín, Inca, Maya and Aztec, to name just some of the New World civilisations who came after.

  Whereas Amazonian societies had their shamans, the Olmec (1400 bc–400 BC), who had agriculture and an hereditary elite (considered in chapter seventeen), possessed a hierarchy of priests and an organised pantheon of deities, in which, even so, the jaguar played a leading role. For example, in Monument 3, as it is known, in San Lorenzo, near present-day Veracruz, there is a sculpture of a huge jaguar monster copulating with a supine human female.11 Monument 4 at Chalcatzingo, in the central Mexican state of Morelos, also shows two felines attacking humans who are falling over. Monument 52 at San Lorenzo, discovered in 1968, shows a half-human, half-feline figure with a snarling ‘were-jaguar’ mouth, its paws resting on its knees. Some scholars regard this as a rain god, or maybe a god of the all-important drainage system – either way, water is involved.

  And it may have been among the Olmec that a new deity began to emerge, which was to become an amalgam of the jaguar, the serpent and the eagle. Plumed jaguars are shown on Relief II at Chalcatzingo.12 This was to become, among the much later Toltecs and Aztecs, Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed or Feathered Serpent god, though Nicholas Saunders thinks the jaguar was involved at the beginning. Certainly, an Olmec ceramic figurine shows a half-human, half-skeletal figure very reminiscent of what early shamanistic experiences are often said to consist of. It is also among Olmec sculptures that we find images, referred to earlier, of humans turning into jaguars.

  Are we therefore seeing two things among the Olmec: the association of ‘jaguarness’ with superiority, which meant that, in a newly evolving hierarchical society, the elite appropriated jaguar qualities; and a transformation from shamanistic society to a post-shamanistic world, with a more complex god, including a more complex relationsh
ip between deities and humans, but one where shamanistic elements remained?

  In the (slightly later) Chavín civilisation (900 bc–200 BC), there are some impressive stone sculptures of feline heads, half-human and half-feline monsters, the latter becoming a marker of Chavín influence in the Andean world. In fact, the feline deity, so impressively depicted in the art of Chavín de Huántar, a pre-Inca culture dated to 900 BC, came to be seen as the unifying force in the Andean context. At one time Chavín was a famous religious centre, Nicholas Saunders tells us, ‘on a par with Jerusalem or Rome’. It was well suited to farming without the need for extensive (and expensive) irrigation and a key to the agricultural success of the area were the ‘vertical archipelagos’ (mentioned earlier) in which the irrigated valley floor forms the lowest layer, the potato fields occupy the upper slopes and the grazing pastures are even higher. In the view of several archaeologists, against this background Chavín de Huántar was simply a ceremonial centre, ‘a mecca built to serve the feline cult.’ This has now been discounted: Chavín was more than a ceremonial centre. But it remained a mecca and one, moreover, where feline symbolism was paramount. It was the location where the idea of an amalgam of felines and eagles seems to have evolved, and a feline staff-bearing god. So here too we may have an incipient post-shamanic scenario emerging, with a priestly caste making an early appearance.13

  Among the many textiles and pottery of Paracas/Nazca art (200 bc– AD 600), which civilisation grew out of Chavín, feline symbolism remains prevalent, as do feline masks and feline-bird sculptures. On one cloth painting, possibly a ceremonial mantle, an elaborately dressed central figure wears a feline mask and has a curling tail with a severed human head at its tip. The figure has cats’ paws for both its feet and hands, in one of which another severed head is held, while in the second hand is an obsidian-tipped knife, indicating ritual headhunting. ‘The taking of human heads to “capture” the powerful essence of the victim’s soul is a well-documented practice in South America. In recent times the Jivaro tribe of Ecuador [this was written in 1989] used to cut off an adversary’s head, peel off the skin and cure it until it became a shrunken head – full of protective supernatural power.’14