ABSTRACT
The jaguar gradually became more and more a legendary creature, endowed with supernatural powers and a bloodthirsty nature, but cowardly and treacherous. The old Indian jaguar cult survives, and the talk about jaguars goes on far into the night, which is haunted with their eerie spirit. The snake and jaguar masks became so elaborately ornamental that the two often merged into a stylized serpent-jaguar motif, a sort of dragon that soon pervaded everything. The double, squared spirals of which these serpents were composed later invaded the monuments, the jades, the pottery, and so on. Perhaps the elite of an ancient and proud Jaguar-People was gradually pushed out from Los Tuxtlas into the isolation of La Venta by waves of new arrivals in the region, people of a new race and religion, wor-shippers of serpents, whom the People of the Jaguar could not tolerate.
