The myth of the jaguar in contemporary Latin American narrative: a conflict within the sacred

Um conflito dentro do sagrado

Abstract

The article focuses on the ancient myths of the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon. Here, on many occasions, the character of the jaguar appears, an animal that arouses the admiration and at the same time the hatred of human beings, inhabitants of the rain forest. On this basis, even today we can find some ancestral societies in Latin America in which stories full of tension and fascination are still told, as a result of the clash between these two incompatible worlds: the world of humans and that of the jaguars, which belong to the animal kingdom. There is then a process of transgression of these ancient stories into the modern text, where the conflict is maintained. We can thus speak of a clear influence of pre-Columbian literature on American writers of the 20th and 21st centuries. Nowadays, there are still examples of stories in which we find the jaguar myth and other literary elements belonging to rain forest indigenism. Such is the case of some storytellers and novelists like Reginaldo Prandi, Horacio de Quiroga, Luis Sepúlveda or Ciro Alegría, who make use of these elements to present us in their books with dazzling stories full of dynamism. In this way, Amazonian orality is still active. The indigenous myth lives on.