Spirit animals in Mesoamerican traditions

The Snake with feathers is Quetzalcoatl for the Nahua, Kukulkan for the Maya of Yucatán: a serpent covered in the green plumes of the quetzal, the most precious bird of the forests. He is the god of wind, of dawn, of knowledge and of the calendar, the one who gave maize to humans. At Chichén Itzá, on the equinoxes, the shadow of the pyramid's steps draws a serpent descending to meet the carved head at the foot of the staircase.

The Panther here is the jaguar, lord of the night and the underworld. Maya kings sat on jaguar thrones and wore its pelt; shamans were said to turn into jaguars after nightfall. Among the Aztecs, the jaguar warriors and the eagle warriors formed the two elite orders: night and day, earth and sky, in the service of the sun.

The Eagle founds Mexico City: the prophecy told the Mexica to settle where they saw an eagle perched on a cactus; they saw it on an island in Lake Texcoco, and built Tenochtitlan. The eagle on the nopal is still at the centre of the Mexican flag.

The Hummingbird gives its name to Huitzilopochtli, "hummingbird of the left" or "of the south", god of the sun and of war: warriors who died in battle accompanied him for four years and then returned to earth as hummingbirds and butterflies. And the Butterfly — the monarch, which arrives in Michoacán in early November after a journey of several thousand kilometres — is welcomed by the Purépecha as the return of the souls for the Day of the Dead. The Bat, finally, is Camazotz, the killer of the Popol Vuh, who beheads one of the Hero Twins in the House of Bats.

The central concept is the nahual (nahualli in Nahuatl, way in Maya): an animal double, assigned at birth according to the day of the 260-day ritual calendar, the tonalpohualli. Whatever the animal suffers, the person suffers; to wound the nahual is to wound the human. Certain specialists, the nahualli, knew how to take the shape of their double. This system survives today in many Indigenous communities of Mexico and Guatemala, under local names and with rules specific to each people.

The second key is the calendar itself: of the twenty day signs, a good share are animals — crocodile, lizard, snake, deer, rabbit, dog, monkey, jaguar, eagle, vulture. To be born on a Jaguar day or an Eagle day says something about your destiny, and the diviners read the painted books, the codices, to advise on a name or a date.

The third is sacrifice and sacred war: the offered heart feeds the sun, and the warrior orders borrow the animal's shape to make that offering possible. It should be neither prettified nor reduced to a caricature: it was a complete cosmology in which the debt to the gods was paid in life.

These traditions do not belong to the past: millions of Nahua, Maya, Purépecha and other peoples still speak their languages, count the days and know their nahual. The Day of the Dead, the return of the monarchs, the jaguar dances are living practices. To draw on them is to name them correctly (Aztec, Maya and Mexican are not synonyms), to read the codices and stories such as the Popol Vuh in good editions, and not to wear as a costume what is, for others, an identity.

What the oracle keeps is the idea of the nahual: an animal that shares your fate, revealed rather than chosen. If the Snake, the Panther, the Eagle, the Hummingbird or the Butterfly speak to you, their Mesoamerican reading is on their page. To learn yours, consult the oracle, or start with the guide to finding your spirit animal.