In the Mesoamerican hall of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a small, lone figure sits inside a niche made solely for it. It is a single piece of serpentine stone or jade, its height as tall as the distance between my fingertips and my wrist, carved into the image of an adult human, seated on one leg and the other leg folded in front. Its elbow rests almost casually atop the knee put forward. But there is nothing casual about its face. The human face is gone. It has been peeled off—this you can see by the slight elevation of the skin encircling the top of the skull. It does not expose a skull, however: a jaguar's face has now been exposed, snarling with a fanged scowl and a head upturned slightly. It is bestial, and yet it is human. I do not know whether it growls softly when the museum is closed and the lights are off. But I would not be surprised if I were to hear its whispers as I put my ear close enough to the glass—unless I started getting suspicious looks from one of the docents.
Where did this jaguar face come from? Throughout Mesoamerica—and for many shamanistic traditions across this planet (and other planets?)—the animal spirit has come forth from deep within the human psyche. In Yucatec Maya, this animal spirit double is called the waay, and among the Aztecs it is the nahual. This concept is an extraordinarily complex one, and an encyclopedic volume could be written on the subject alone. May the ancestors pardon me if I have to exclude some major aspects of the nahual as I refer to it in this column.
Mircea Eliade, in his overview of shamanism at a global level, and Peter T. Furst, focusing on the Huichols with whom I share ancestry, have alluded to the animal double as a return to illo tempore, that mythical time prior to and outside of creation, when there were no beings distinguished as humans or animals or spirits or gods—we were all of the same nature. We were all of spirit and mind, all of the same capacity before everything became divided. The shaman can claim the powers of animals like the jaguar because once, long ago, those who would become human shared the same qualities as those who would become animal. In that time, there were neither humans nor animals.
In chapter 13 of the Buddhist Visuddhi Magga, the realm between the destruction of one world-system and the growth of the next is a Brahma realm, such as the World of Streaming Radiance (section 44) or the Subakhina World (section 57), and prior to the formation of a new world-system this is where all beings reside. Our desires are the forces that shape the world back into being, and it is our karmic past that shapes our bodies into the myriads of species. But there is a part in each of us that has never been differentiated. It is fundamentally pure and immutable. This is the Buddha-nature of the mind. This is the piece of precious jade that the Aztecs believed to reside in the heart of every new-born. Though our negative actions may smear the jade with filth, it never loses its innate lustre. Penance and redemption wipe the jade clean and let it shine again, according to the Nahua elders cited by Friar Sahagun. The essential is brought into unity with the contingent. The two are made into one.
"When you make the two one, you will become the sons of man, and when you say, 'Mountain, move away,' it will move away." In the Gospel of Thomas 106, Jesus reminds us that we exist in two realms, the spiritual and the physical; when these two are fully integrated, a great power can be realized. The body has a spirit double, the twin which is the "Didymos" in Greek and "Thomas" in Aramaic. Some interpretations would even go far enough to say that this spiritual double is the "Son of Man" that purely existed before the creation of the world. If this were so, it could perhaps be that same Son of Man that the Savior proclaimed to be within each of us in the Gospel of Mary (BG 8502: 8,18.19). But must this spiritual twin necessarily look like a human? What if it could look like a jaguar? The shaman is the one who has attained his or her power by unifying the spirit with the body—even if this spirit has appeared as an animal. The Buddha is the one who has attained enlightenment by bringing the realms of nirvana and samsara into complete unity within his or herself. The duality between nirvana and samsara is no longer an artificial distinction. It never really was.
When I see that little carved figure mentioned above, I see that unification between body and spirit. It was carved by an Olmec from the Gulf of Mexico coast; it could be up to three thousand years old. I do not want to perpetuate the fallacy that the Olmecs were the "Mother civilization" which inspired all of the following cultures in Mesoamerica, but I cannot avoid the fact that the relation between human body and animal double has been one of the most fundamental concepts of Mesoamerican religion for the past four thousand years. I know I am committing the sin of eisegesis when I impose the kinds of metaphysical concepts mentioned earlier onto this simple little statue. Or it could just be that these ancient shamans had a more enlightened understanding of the world and the soul than we would like to imagine.
In closing, I feel it necessary to say that our distinctiveness is not something that must be totally abandoned. It is as humans that we can appreciate those things which make us human. Such as? In the Qui-che' Maya creation myth from the Popol Vuh, that which distinguishes humans from the other animals is our unique capacity to speak the name of God. Certainly, the animals may be praising the gods through their chirps and croaks, but the human voice is articulate. We compose requiems, write sutras, and build cathedrals. Finally, there is a word in Nahuatl that I would like to share: tlacayotl. Tlacayotl is a concept has been translated as the capacity for mercy, hospitality, and kindness. It is the quality of compassion. Quite literally, it translates into something like "human-ness." For the Aztecs, then, tlacayotl represents the very things that make us human.