The Great Cats: Tiger, Leopard, Lion and Jaguar

The same idea in another coat

Folklorists have long noticed that the animal of transformation is almost always the chief predator of the district. The reasons are not hard to guess. It is the animal people most fear and most admire, the one whose strength they would most like to borrow, and the one whose attacks most need explaining.

The stories gathered here are told very differently from the European werewolf tale. In several of them the shapeshifter is an ancestor or a guardian, and to be of the tiger's kin is an honor.

Tiger people of Asia

Wherever the tiger lives, from India through Southeast Asia to China, there are tiger people.

In the Malay world and Sumatra the weretiger is harimau jadian. In some highland districts it was said that certain villages were inhabited entirely by people who could become tigers, and travelers told of crossing a river and finding a town of them. But the Sumatran tiger is also an ancestor. In many communities tigers were addressed as "grandfather" and were believed to watch over their human descendants, punishing those who broke the old laws and leaving the upright alone. A tiger that killed was a tiger that had been wronged.

In the hills of northeastern India, some peoples held that particular men and women had a tiger double. The person's soul lived partly in the tiger, and what befell one befell the other, so that when the tiger was hunted the person sickened, and when it died they died.

Chinese tales tell of men who become tigers by putting on a tiger skin, and of tigers who put one off and pass as travelers at an inn, in a manner very close to the wolfskin stories of the north.

Lion, leopard and hyena in Africa

Across much of Africa, traditional belief includes people who can take the shape of lions, leopards or hyenas, and animals that are the doubles of living people. The details differ greatly among the continent's many peoples.

The lion and the leopard are bound up with kingship. Rulers wore their skins, were greeted by their names, and were sometimes said to return as them after death. A lion that appeared near a royal grave might be treated with the respect due to the king.

The hyena has a more uneasy reputation. In Ethiopia and neighboring lands it was said that certain craftsmen, blacksmiths above all, could turn into hyenas at night. The belief attached itself to people who were already set a little apart by their trade, and it could be used against them, which is a pattern that shapeshifter beliefs have followed in many places.

A word of caution is in order. Much of what was written about African "leopard men" and the like in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came from colonial officials and travelers, and was sensational, ill-informed, or both. It is poor evidence of what people actually believed.

The jaguar of the Americas

In the American tropics the lord of the forest is the jaguar, and it stands at the center of some of the oldest religious imagery in the hemisphere.

The earliest great culture of Mexico, some three thousand years ago, carved figures that blend human and jaguar features: a snarling, downturned mouth, almond eyes, a cleft brow. What they meant to their makers is still debated. Later peoples of the region painted rulers seated on jaguar thrones and wearing jaguar pelts, and depicted spirit companions in animal form.

Two ideas recorded from Mexico and Central America are often confused. One is the animal counterpart: the belief that each person is linked from birth to an animal whose fate they share. The other is the nagual, a person with the power to take animal shape, who might be a healer and protector of the community or a feared sorcerer. Early colonial writers, hostile to both ideas, ran them together and painted them black.

In the great river forests of South America, among many peoples, the shaman and the jaguar are near relations. A powerful shaman is said to be able to see as a jaguar sees, to travel as one, and at death to become one. In some languages the same word serves for both.

Cats nearer home

Europe, having no great cat, made do with the small one. Witches were widely believed to go about as cats or hares, and the shared wound motif appears here too: the cat struck in the night, the old woman found limping in the morning. These tales belong to the history of the witch trials and have little of the grandeur of the tiger ancestors.

Living traditions

Nearly everything on this page comes from cultures that are very much alive, and for which the tiger, the leopard and the jaguar are not characters but relatives, rulers and gods. The summaries given here are brief and second-hand. They are meant as signposts. Anyone who wishes to go further should seek out accounts given by members of those cultures themselves, and should be slow to borrow what has not been offered.