Lions and Jaguars and Bears, Oh My!

Question: Can you guys do a blog about the cool jaguar gods across the Central and South American pantheons? - griffinguy24 (as if you couldn't fucking guess)

We definitely could guess, but we're always willing to talk about jaguar awesomeness with you, Griff!

Mesoamerican and South American mythologies abound with jaguar gods and magical jaguar heroes. This is one of the things that sometimes confuses people into thinking that all those south-of-the-equator religions are the same or mostly the same, but of course that's not what's going on at all; what's going on is that jaguars are the apex predator of that area as well as stunning to look at and violently dangerous toward mankind, and as a result they're a natural place to turn to for mythic tales and symbolism. Jaguars are all over southern American mythology for the same reason lions are all over middle eastern mythology and bears all over northern American mythology; those are the big, obviously important, possibly divine and definitely scary creatures of those areas, so they naturally become associated with gods and monsters.

Of course, the jaguar god we all know and hate to love the most is probably Tezcatlipoca, the Aztec god of darkness, the night, scary magical shenanigans and being relentlessly horrible to everyone else in his pantheon. Not only is he frequently shown with jaguar attributes or body parts, but thanks to the Aztec concept of the nahualli, he is a jaguar in his other half, Tepeyollotl, the heart of the mountain, who was conceived of as so monstrously strong and terrible that he could cause earthquakes and disasters with his flailings. When Tezcatlipoca was the sun and Quetzalcoatl knocked him from his preeminent position in the heavens, he destroyed the First World by having every living thing in it eaten by jaguars, which is probably not in anyone's top ten ways to go. Forget zombie apocalypse; jaguar apocalypse is fucking terrifying.

Tezcatlipoca as Tepeyollotl, wreaking the usual amount of havoc

A little bit south of the Aztecs we come to the Maya, who have several jaguar-related deities, the most prominent of which is Ix Chel, the scary old goddess of flooding, wisdom and doing whatever she wants, much to everyone else's discomfort. Jaguar imagery is extremely widespread among Maya gods and many of them may sport jaguar spots on their faces or jaguar fangs in their mouths as well as the "jaguar eye", a particular way of drawing a square eye that denotes a connection to the animal, and Ix Chel often turns up with these as well as fearsome jaguar claws on her fingers. She's credited with giving birth to several children who were jaguars, although the myth isn't always clear on whether these wree normal animals - making it perilous to kill jaguars without possible incurring her wrath - or jaguar gods. Right behind her is Xbalanque, the second half of the famous Hero Twins, whose very name includes the Maya word for jaguar ("balam") and who also tends to appear with jaguar attributes (especially jaguar fur on his body and face), which probably helped him and his brother manage the terrible House of Jaguars in Xibalba without being eaten alive on their way through. The sun god of the Maya, K'inich Ahau, is also often credited with being a jaguar deity, thanks to similar iconography and a few mentions of jaguars as his totem creatures as well as strong connection to the Terrestrial Jaguar God or Underworld Jaguar God, believed to be the form he takes on when he brings the sun through the Underworld during the night, but since he's the sun god there's some mention of those being "golden jaguars", which might suggest that the Maya were actually talking about pumas they encountered in the mountainous areas of their territory. We like that approach and it's the one we used in the K'uh, because we've got way enough jaguars around here already, but he also might be considered a jaguar god to be reckoned with.

Ix Chel looking terrifying as usual, with a jaguar in one hand among other animals


A Yaxchilan Maya king impersonating Xbalanque in a ritual dance, complete with full jaguar spots


K'inich Ahau as the Terrestrial Jaguar, about to charge through the underworld like a boss

And that's really just a small sampling of jaguar gods from the Maya, who are alllll about jaguars, all the time, anywhere you can name. I can think of at least three more that are probably running around at Legend 10 or so.

And, of course, who can forget the Olmecs, the old and mysterious early culture of Mesoamerica who we know very little about and who various weird New Age magazines seem to think were aliens? The Olmecs didn't leave any writing we can decipher and were around so much earlier than most of the other Mesoamerican religions that most of their artifacts have been badly damaged, but we know they were all about some jaguars, most aptly expressed by this monstrosity of a thing we found:

The Seated Jaguar God, or so some scholars kind of suppose

What is that thing? Who is it? We have no idea, but it's got the fangs and it's large and in charge.

Further south, the Inca people don't have an official jaguar god in their pantheon, but instead have mentions of dangerous jaguar monsters that must be overcome or harnessed by the gods in order to keep things running smoothly. One myth mentions that Viracocha, the creator-god of the pantheon, had to defeat a rampaging jaguar when he created the world lest it devour all his creations; another popular belief is that lunar eclipses are in fact the same jaguar monster attacking and attempting to swallow Mama Quilla, the moon goddess, leading to the Inca practice of running outside, making a lot of noise and throwing things at the sky in an attempt to help frighten it off and save her. When most of the world's mythologies say "OMFG ECLIPSE HIDE EVERYONE HIDE", you have to give props to the people who instead go "OMFG ECLIPSE GET OUT THERE MEN GET OUT THERE AND SHOW IT WHO'S BOSS". But the lack of an official god of jaguars doesn't prevent them from still being a huge deal in Inca mythology; one of their most important magical phenomena is that of the runauturuncu, literally man-jaguar, which is basically about what it sounds like - a scary magical were-jaguar. Many ceremonial Inca sites and works of art show priests and servants of the gods able to turn into jaguars, and in modern Quechuan myth the story has also grown up that anyone can become a runauturnucu by making a deal with Supay, the god of mines and death (although of course making deals with Supay is a terrible fucking idea but you know people do it anyway).

A runauturuncu, looking pleased about life, because what's not to like here?

But the Inca are far from having the monopoly on were-jaguar shenanigans down south of the equator. In the rest of South America, there are fewer of what we tend to think of as "formal" mythologies - that is, there are certainly tons of people with their own unique mythology and religions, but few that are as large and hierarchical as the Inca or the pantheons of Mesoamerica, leading to lots of small religions with only two or three gods or less formal animistic religions that believe in spirits and natural powers but not necessarily gods. But you'd better believe they believed in jaguars, especially the peoples of the Amazon, who were quite aware that being eaten by a jaguar was a real possibility for the end of their lives if they weren't careful on hunting trips and traveling missions. Several of the native peoples of Bolivia and the northern rainforest center their entire spiritual life around jaguars - their bones and semen are used for ritual medicine and potions, their furs worn for protection, their good nature invoked to ease hunting, and young men in some areas even today still have to go on a jaguar hunt to prove their adulthood (in fact, this is the reason that Bolivia is sadly one of the few South American countries that still allows trophy hunting of the endangered animal in spite of international conservation efforts - the jaguar hunt is very ingrained and the government isn't particularly worried about rooting it out). Other parts of the Amazon abound with stories of anthropomorphic jaguars - either people who can turn into jaguars or jaguars who can turn into people, or weird hybrid creatures that embody both - and the stories of their activities vary with an endless variety of craziness. Some say that jaguars devour the souls of the dead, others that it was jaguars who granted mankind fire and taught them how to hunt, still others that jaguars are the "brothers-in-law" of humanity and therefore off-limits for hunting or irritating, and a million other little things depending on a peoples' location and how many jaguars they had to deal with in ancient times.

No discussion of the Amazon mythologies is complete without the total wackiness of the Guarani, a southern Amazonian ethnic group that has some of the scariest and most monster-heavy mythology on the entire continent. Their jaguar god goes by the name of Teju-Jagua (literally "lizard-jaguar", in the Tupa language which is where we get the word "jaguar" from, by the way - before that, the Europeans just called them "American tigers") and is one of the monstrous sons of Tau, the evil oppositional god who plagues the pantheon with his trickery and general jerkfacedness. Because he was the son of Tau (and the product of rape, in most stories), he was cursed by the moon goddess and mother of the pantheon Arasy, and thus born monstrous and horrifying, with seven jaguar heads grafted onto a scaly iguana's body and the ability to breathe fire and strike onlookers blind with his ugliness. The poor guy isn't particularly beloved by the Guarani for obvious reasons, but the creator god of the pantheon, Tupa, took pity on him enough to calm him down so that he isn't a ravening monster and put him to work guarding the treasures of the earth and water, which keeps him busy so he isn't tempted to go about eating everyone and everything. Even so, smaller versions of him - his children - are said to lurk in rivers and deep pools and drag the unwary in to be eaten, so it generally behooves one to avoid his territories.

What the living fuck, Guarani mythology?

By the way, an alternative tradition identifies Teju-Jagua's heads as dogs instead of jaguars. Possibly because no one can tell what in the name of shit is supposed to be going on up there.

Broken Homes

Question: So, what's the relationship between Xochiquetzal and Tezcatlipoca nowadays? I've heard some claims that she's the Smoking Mirror's wife now (one of four), but not all sources seem to agree.

Not good, in our opinion. There's room to go either way, though.

For those unaware of their sordid past, Xochiquetzal was once seduced by Tezcatlipoca, god of masculinity and seduction among his many other talents (and since she's also the goddess of love and sex, sparks were bound to fly). It depends on the teller of the tale whether this was a mutual affair, she was blandished into it or he even physically kidnapped her. Even if it was voluntary, the problem with this was that she was also married at the time, to Tlaloc, who happened to be serving as the third sun; her disloyalty so upset him that he caused the rain of fire that destroyed the Third World, and forced everyone to restart creation and elect a new sun again. It was a pretty big debacle, and Xochiquetzal summarily ceased being associated much with Tlaloc, who gained a new wife in the water goddess Chalchiuhtlicue.

However, Xochiquetzal also ceases being associated with Tezcatlipoca in any meaningful way as well. The god is said to have wives, but those wives' identities are hard to pin down, given as various different names in different sources or not elaborated on at all, often left as identifiers of his association with wealth and masculinity rather than characters themselves. The idea of four wives comes from the ixiptla cult, in which a Tezcatlipoca impersonator was assigned four "wives" who were impersonators of four goddesses including Xochiquetzal, but it's hard to be certain whether they meant that Tezcatlipoca literally had four wives or whether that was just the convenient number for the ritual (after all, four is the magic number in Mesoamerican religion; if you asked them how many there were of anything sacred but undefined, they'd probably say four). It's also very possible that he wasn't necessarily believed to be married to those particular goddesses, but that they were there as representatives of concepts associated with the ixiptla's death and offering to Tezcatlipoca; under this theory, the women represent life-giving forces (sex, crafts, salt and fertility of the earth) and the ixiptla represents humanity making use of them, and the Xochiquetzal impersonator is there as a representative of sex propagating humanity rather than a wife in the human sense.

At any rate, Xochiquetzal certainly has an affair with Tezcatlipoca, but thereafter they split so thoroughly that they might as well not even be in the same pantheon anymore. Xochiquetzal's stories never mention even a whisper of Tezcatlipoca; she acts as a free agent, seducing mortals, producing flowers and generally acting like an unattached, swinging single lady. She's much more often associated with her brother Xochipilli when with anyone, since they share a lot of real estate as gods of fertility and fun. Tezcatlipoca, similarly, never has another myth in which the flower goddess is mentioned, and goes about his business being a solo giant pain in everyone's ass.

This doesn't necessarily mean they aren't married; after all, married couples in Aztec myth generally don't do a whole lot together, and their marriages were probably conceived of as partnerships between deities of related concepts (Tlaloc as rain and Chalchiuhtlicue as water, for example) rather than relationships that made much of a narrative difference to the exploits of the gods. But it also leaves us with seriously no way of knowing whether the Aztecs considered Xochiquetzal to have remained with her illicit lover or stayed single after her spectacular divorce, so either option is available.

In our games, we assume the flower goddess is unattached, the better to ply her trade as goddess of sexy lovefests without anything getting in the way too much, and that there's a lot of simmering uncomfortable sentiment still breweing between her, Tlaloc and Tezcatlipoca, none of whom are happy with one another (well, except Tezcatlipoca, he probably gives no fucks). Sowiljr is currently trying to get her betrothed to Tonatiuh in the hopes of settling the godrealm down and replacing some of the gods lost in the great Norse debacle of several years ago, although how successful he's going to be will depend on his resistance rolls, her willingness to settle for a god she didn't choose for herself and Eztli's hold on her temper.

Most Masculine of Birds

Question: You've listed Tepeyollotl as the nahualli of Tezcatlipoca, and while that makes sense I have one question. I read about a god named Chalchihuihtotolin who was also listed as Tezcatlipoca's nahualli. Is this a case of bad info or multiple nahualli?

Hard to say, actually!

"Chalchiuhtotolin" is really just a very fancy way of saying "jade poultry", which is referring to that most venerable creature: the turkey. Don't laugh. Aztec turkeys are serious business.

See? He is not to be trifled with.

Turkeys do in fact appear associated with Tezcatlipoca more than a few times in Aztec art and iconography; sometimes they even have the smoking mirror replacing one of their feet, a clear sign that we're actually looking at Tezcatlipoca in the form of a turkey. Turkeys were heavily associated with nobility thanks to their impressive size and coloring, and since Tezcatlipoca is the god of nobility himself, it makes natural sense for turkeys to be attached to him, and he also sometimes shows up wearing their feathers. Turkeys were also symbols of youth and masculine virility (which makes sense if you have ever seen a male turkey freak out over mating season), another of Tezcatlipoca's traditional domains. And finally, turkeys are delicious, which made them a perfect symbol for sacrificial victims, leading them to be linked to the cult of the ixiptla, a mortal who "became" Tezcatlipoca before being sacrificed to him.

It's really up to individual Storyteller decision whether or not Chalchiuhtotolin is actually a nahualli, or just a shape Tezcatlipoca takes sometimes, or even a minor god of his own who works closely with him (a former Scion, perhaps?). Old Tezcat is famous for turning into all kinds of things, not just random animals but also inanimate objects and various humans, and so it's sometimes a little sketchy to try to guess whether the turkey is genuinely a nahualli or just one of his many shenanigans. Certainly, the turkey isn't nearly as commonly or strongly associated with him as the jaguar, so some scholars have placed it at a lower level of importance than a full-on nahualli would have. At the same time, though, the turkey (especially with mirror-foot) definitely appears to be an aspect of Tezcatlipoca in some way, and there's certainly a precedent in Aztec mythology for gods with more than one nahualli in both Huitzilopochtli (the hummingbird and the eagle) and Itzpapalotl (the butterfly/bat and the deer).

So it's your call, really. Tepeyollotl is pretty solid as the Smoking Mirror's better half, but that doesn't mean you can't use Chalchiuhtotolin as another nahualli belonging to him if you want to. And even if you decide against going with a true nahualli, for a god as full of shapeshifting and illusiory misbehavior as Tezcatlipoca, turning into a turkey on a whim whenever it suits your plot is as easy as snapping his fingers or inducing Quetzalcoatl to commit suicide.

Social Climbing

Question: You had Eshu vs Loki the other day, how about Isis vs Tezcat? How would you handle conflicts between those kind of social powerhouses who always get what they want? How could PCs handle them when they reach godhood? I know Geoff's already told Isis where to get off, but surely she hasn't just left it at that?

Social powers have so many options and layers that this question is basically unanswerable (which is also why it's sat in the queue for so long - sorry, asker!). If you think about all the different things social characters can do to perpetrate shenanigans, encourage behavior and influence one another even as Heroes and Demigods, you already have an idea of how insane the scale must become when they get to the level of actual deities.

As we've talked about before, it's mostly fruitless to talk about "which god would win", because that's not only something that is nearly impossible to forecast thanks to all the variables and kinds of powers in play, it's also unlikely to come up because there are entire pantheons and relatives associated with them that know better than to let things get to that level. Actual outright conflict between gods is probably pretty rare, because it makes life miserable for everyone, not just the main members of the feud. As we said before, when Eshu and Loki get into a tiff, the world loses.

But social conflicts don't necessarily have to erupt into armed beatings - in fact, most of the time they probably don't, except in the rare cases of socially manipulative people who are not smart enough to realize what a bad idea that is. Instead, they look a lot more like terrible, terrible cold wars, where both sides play a game of vicious wizard's chess with all the people they know and can get their hands on as pieces. Social characters with Charisma will play Who's Your Daddy with everyone they know, always winning friends and allies away from others with sheer force of their awesomeness; whomever's actually in the room is probably winning, because Charisma requires that kind of up close and personal attention most of the time, but your friends can prevail on their friends and soon it's a chain of a bunch of people doing crazy things out of love for you just to stick it to the other guy. Characters with Manipulation, on the other hand, can weave their influence even more subtly, spreading evil rumors about you, convincing others that you want things you don't want, turning your friends and even relatives against you and laying curses and traps just waiting to trip you up.

One of the things about being Isis or Tezcatlipoca is that, yeah, you always get what you want - inside your own little pool, that is. Unless you're going up against someone with a truly heinous resistance score, your home pantheon-mates are probably mostly susceptible to your charms - you're the resident manipulator or major presence, after all. But when you branch out into the larger world of Scion and come up against other puppetmasters and leaders, it becomes an increasingly complex and insane web of possibilities, and there's no way to predict what would happen. Every new person, situation, alliance or enmity introduces new variables that could completely change what happens, and a feud between the same two gods could go off infinite different ways, like a multitude of parallel universes.

So the answer is really whatever your Storyteller can come up with. If Isis and Tezcatlipoca want to get into it, they're going to be in an insane, subtle, ongoing prank and influence war that might stretch anywhere from corrupting one anothers' cults to misdirecting one anothers' Scions to interfering in one anothers' family lives and everything else they think they can get away with. PCs trying to deal with it are going to find themselves embroiled, possibly even before they know it, and more often than not targeted. Hopefully they can play the game right back (or if not, survive its consequences).

As for Isis in our games... well, she and Geoff are not getting along. There's been kidnapping, violence, influencing other gods to attack one another, pantheon schisms and probably a whole lot more behind the scenes that the PCs aren't even aware she's up to. Recently, Jioni tried to pray at a temple to Isis to regain some Legend and everyone got attacked by members of the Centzonmimixcoa that Isis shanghai'd into striking against them, which led to a lot of heartbreak and screaming Aztec fury. That problem's probably not going to get fixed any time soon, but feuds between gods that last forever are one of the staples of mythology, so it only stands to reason that Scions pick some up as they go.

No, We Can't All Just Get Along

Question: In your game, what transpired to make the Trimurti, Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca the enemies of Odin?

Two separate events, actually.

Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca join the rest of their pantheon in hating most of Odin's guts. While the two pantheons were supposedly allies, working together and sealed as neighbors by the marriage of their children Geoff and Sangria, Odin was behind the scenes attempting to annex as much of Mexico as he could get away with, partly out of his usual Odin-esque desire for conquest and expansion and partly because he was hoping that entangling his Fate with that of the Aztlanti might help him get out of Ragnarok. The Mexican gods, embroiled as they were in fighting several Titans at the time, didn't notice what he was doing until serious damage had been done, and things eventually came to a cataclysmic and destructive head when they confronted each other. I won't say exactly what happened because it's going to be the subject of some of the upcoming stories about Geoff's band, but the rift between the two pantheons was massive and the vast majority of the Aztlanti now view Odin as a traitor to their alliance.

As for the Trimurti, in their case they were the aggressors. After having serious problems on the home front with a certain one of their members deciding to go batshit and try to uncreate a lot of stuff, they shanghaied Aurora's band into helping them defeat him and clean up the mess. Unfortunately, they didn't ask first, and being that they tend to have a somewhat lofty opinion of themselves, they really didn't feel like they needed to. When Aurora expressed some concern that their divine parents were likely to kick their asses for haring off on a trans-continental Indian adventure instead of doing what they'd been told to do, the Trimurti rolled up into Asgard and Odin's feasting hall while he was having dinner, dropped off the kids and declared in front of most of the Aesir that nobody was to punish them or they would have to answer to them. Then they went home, blissfully uncaring of the epic insult they had just delivered to the king of the Aesir, and the band had to deal with the unpleasant fallout.

While the shenanigans with the Trimurti are not ready to make it to fiction for a while yet, you can see some of the ramp-up of the problems between the Aesir and Aztlanti in some of the stories. In Foundations, the first evidence of problems in Mexico appears and the first accusations of Norse involvement are leveled; in Drums of War the Norse confirm what they're up to but have not yet erupted into actual conflict; in Bone, Muscle, Heart and Sinew Sangria and her fellow Aztlanti Scions begin dealing with the problem and attempting to safeguard their people, and in What Dreams May Come Woody's band sees the Aesir contingent hard at work in Mexico and is warned about the fighting that has begun to break out.

Gods of Sun and Sacrifice

Question: Could you please go over the Aztec associated powers overhaul? Some of them make sense (Quetzalcoatl gaining Stars or Tezcatlipoca gaining Chaos), but others really, really don't (Tezcatlipoca gaining Health... and Xipe Totec losing it).

Oh, my friends, you know I'm always ready to talk about Aztecs. Let's do this!

...and because I love to talk about Aztecs, I now realize after finishing this post that it's way too long for common consumption. Follow me behind the jump if you dare.