30 May 2025 / 10 House
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Find out moreWhy weren’t cougars more prominent in Mesoamerican myth?
Puma, Florentine Codex Book XI
ORIGINAL QUESTION received from - and thanks to - (Anonymous): Why weren’t cougars (Miztli in Nahuatl) so prominent in mesoamerican myth and art? I know they have been seen in some burial sites and sometimes depicted in arts, but most of the time, they are absent. In Aridoamerica (the American Southwest), cougars are more represented in myths and arts than jaguars and in South America both felines are mostly revered on par but in mesoamerica, cougars significantly lose cultural importance than jaguars. Why does that happen? (Answered by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore)
We understand that cougars are pumas by another name. We’ve not come across any references to cougars in source books on ancient Mesoamerica, whereas pumas feature often - not as commonly as jaguars, it’s true, but then several scholars suggest there has historically been confusion between the two species of big cat, both of which inhabited central and southern Mexico at the time of the Spanish invasion. After giving an example of a case where a zoologist mistakes a puma for a jaguar, Keith Jordan warns ‘all such identifications should be regarded as provisional at best’ (2023: 107).
Without doubt, ‘the jaguar and the puma were of deep political and religious significance from the time of the Olmecs to that of the Aztecs’, associated with the night, underworld, earth, fertility, war, sacrifice, magic and sorcery (López Luján 2002: 403).
Both creatures were admired - and are still admired today - as powerful and desirable ‘animal doubles’ (companion spirits) (Olivier 2013: 105).
Both felines feature alongside each other in Volume XI of the Florentine Codex: predictably the jaguar comes first, with the longest description, but the puma is depicted three times, as miztli in Nahuatl, as mazamiztli (puma with deerskin-like fur) and as cuiltlamiztli (‘gluttonous’ puma).
The puma was one of a select few apex predators that served as ‘military and lineage symbols in the Postclassic’ (Milbrath 2023: 408). In the Maya city-state of Copán, pumas as well as jaguars were kept and traded ‘primarily for royal rituals and expressions of power during its entire dynastic history’ (Kristen-Graham 2023: 148). Just as at Teotihuacan, amongst the offerings at the Mexica Templo Mayor 32 animals adorned with ornaments and insignia have so far been found, belonging to just six of the over 500 species identified in the ruins of the sacred precinct. These are: 13 golden eagles, a peregrine falcon, two hawks, seven Mexican grey wolves, SEVEN PUMAS and two jaguars - all ‘super predators’ (López Luján, Aguirre Molina & Elizalde Mendez 2023: 246).
As a final indication of the puma’s importance, not only have sacrificial flint knives been found in the mouths of the wolves and pumas in the Templo Mayor offerings - suggesting perhaps ‘that they are fearsome beings that bite and thus are associated with the ideas of sacrifice and death’, but a large spherical greenstone bead was stuck in the jaws of the puma in one of the offering chambers. ‘The greenstone bead or sphere, which in many contexts symbolises the human heart, brings to mind a scene in the Codex Vaticanus A that depicts a heart being eaten by a wild beast. This image corresponding to the penultimate level of the underworld is accompanied with the gloss “Teocoyolcualoya”, which means “Where Beasts Devour Hearts or Divine Spheres”’ (ibid: 265, 268-9).
All this suggests to us that the puma (cougar) was held in high regard mythologically in ancient Mesoamerica, second ‘in command’ as it were to the jaguar, that ruled supreme.
POSTSCRIPT: The puma steals the show at the huge ‘Mexica’ exhibition at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris...!
Sources:-
• Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, Book 11 - Earthly Things (1963), translated with notes by Charles E. Dibble and Arthur J. O. Anderson, School of American Research and University of Utah, Santa Fe, New Mexico
• Jordan, Keith (2023) ‘Pumas and Eagles and Wolves, Oh My! The Appropriation and Alteration of Teotihuacan Processing Predators at Tula’, in Birds and Beasts of Ancient Mesoamerica: Animal Symbolism in the Postclassic Period edited by Susan Milbrath and Elizabeth Baquedano, University Press of Colorado
• Kristan-Graham, Cynthia (2023) ‘An Animal Kingdom at Chichen Itza: Reconstructing a Sculptural Tableau at the Sacred Cenote’ in Birds and Beasts... op cit
• López Luján, Leonardo, Aguirre Molina, Alejandra and Elizalde Mendez, Israel (2023) ‘Dressed to Kill: Richly Adorned Animals in the Offerings of the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan’, in Birds and Beasts... op cit
• López Luján, Leonardo (2002) ‘Mythological feline’, exhibition catalogue entry in Aztecs, Royal Academy of Arts, London
• Milbrath, Susan (2023) ‘A New World Bestiary in Postclassic Mesoamerica’ in Birds and Beasts... op cit
• Olivier, Guilhem (2003) Mockeries and Metamorphoses of an Aztec God: Tezcatlipoca, ‘Lord of the Smoking Mirror’, University Press of Colorado.
Picture sources:-
• Images (main, and ‘cuitlzmiztli’) from the Florentine Codex scanned from our own copy of the Club Internacional del Libro 3-volume facsimile edition, Madrid, 1994
• Sculpture of a mythological feline - image scanned from exhibition catalogue Aztecs op cit
• Cougar photo by National Park Service, downloaded from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mountain_Lion_in_Glacier_National_Park.jpg
• Detail from the Codex Vaticanus A scanned from our own copy of the ADEVA facsimile edition (Graz, Austria, 1979)
• Stuffed puma: photo by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore.
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Puma, Florentine Codex Book XI
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