"There was a strong preoccupation with tigers, spirits, and bhuts, or ghosts. ‘That was the first time I had heard a tiger actually referred to by its name,’ Kovalski was to say. ‘In India people always called it ‘the big cat,’ ‘the great wild beast,’ ‘the great feline,’ but never ‘the tiger,’ for fear of attracting the attention of its spirit and thereby making it appear. It was a taboo that had been brought originally from the countryside where tigers still devoured more than three hundred people a year in Bengal alone. The threat of them haunted many a child. What mother in the City of Joy had not said to her offspring at some time or other, ‘If you’re not good, I’ll call the big cat.’"
— Dominique Lapierre. City of Joy. Translated from the French by Kathryn Spink. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1985. p. 330.
"The jaguar symbolizes the shaman’s journey to the underworld. According to Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan, hunting/stalking is a symbolic description of the psychological attitude needed for obtaining information from the natural (unconscious). ... In archetypal psychological terms, you could say that the jaguar symbolizes the consciousness that stalks in the darkness of the underworld, searching for knowledge and seeking to fulfill one’s personal myth. According to Burr Cartwright Brundage, the same Mayan word, balam, is used for jaguar and sorcerer."
— Gloria E. Alzaldúa. Light in the Dark / Luz en lo oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality. ed. Analouise Keating. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015. Chapter 3.
"What is a tigre mojano?"
Mene looked around the circle, and then said, 'Well, given my last story, you're not going to believe a word I say, but it's the tiger that is also human, the one that has the soul of the Indian witch.'
He said he had learned of the tiger from his grandmother. 'The shaman is in the body of the tiger and will protect the forest at all cost. That is how you know it is a tigre mojano: it will attack humans without direct provocation. And if you look closely, it has the testicles of a man.'
Adilma smacked him on the leg for that one, saying, 'Who do you think we are, sailors in a bar?' Then she turned to me and added to the story. She said she had heard of an herb the Putumayo Indians take to turn into tigers: it is yagé, also called tigre huasca. For protection, they wear a tiger's tooth from one that came into the village and was captured and killed. They believe it connects them with the forest.
— Diane Thiel ('88, '90 MFA). "The Lady and the Tiger." Excerpted from The White Horse: A Colombian Journey. Printed in Alumni POV, Brown Alumni Magazine. July/August 2004.
"In Upper Burma, among the Taman tribe of the Upper Chindwin river, if a man wishes to turn himself into a tiger he urinates on the ground, strips himself, and rolls on the place which he has wetted."
— Nudity in India in Custom and Ritual. W. Crooke, C.I.E., Hon. D.Sc. Oxon. Reprinted from the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol XLIX, July-December, 1919. Published by the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 50, Great Russell Street, London, W.C 1. p. 249. Footnoted to Journ. Roy. Anthrop. Inst., xli, 306.
Why a rare image of one of Malaysia’s last tigers is giving conservationists hope, Rebecca Cairns, CNN, January 16, 2024
As the "bear is never just a bear"...
"Native American cultures have long acknowledged the powerful symbolism of the bear, recognizing its wisdom, courage, power, and strength, as well as its unpredictability. Some cultures also see the bear as a healing maternal spirit with powerful medicine, a peaceful solitary mother figure who is, nevertheless, capable of great savagery and aggression when provoked or threatened. The bear is never just a bear. It is always something greater and more wild, more sublime and powerful than humans can perhaps ever fully understand."
— Steven Church. One With the Tiger: Sublime and Violent Encounters Between Humans and Animals. Soft Skull Press, 2016. p. 34.
...so is the tiger never just a tiger.
And if you let human/nature boundaries remain malleable, you may find that humans and animals can turn into each other.
“The Yoruba word for forest is igbo, and the name for the special area is etile, so together the reserve is igbo etile. Inside of the igbo etile no animals can be hunted. They are safe there.
There is another type of huge forest reserve called eluju gbogbofo. This large area is farther from town, and people are not allowed to enter there — not to hunt or do anything at all. The only uses of the eluju gbogbofo are magical. Human beings can go there to turn into animals, and animals can turn into human beings. In these untouched places, metamorphosis and evolution are possible. In the natural state of the earth, the boundaries between humans and the rest of nature are malleable. There, the boundaries between the human world and the spirit world are not fixed. Long ago, there were certain people living in the tops of the trees in the forest, and the missionaries tried to make them come down. They wanted the boundaries between humans and nature to be fixed. But once boundaries are fixed, there becomes division.”
— Awise Agbaye Wande Abimbola, special advisor to the president of Nigeria on cultural affairs and traditional matters. Interviewed by Leah Penniman. Black Earth Wisdom: Soulful Conversations With Black Environmentalists. Amistad, 2023. Chapter: "It Is Time for a New Covenant."
The tiger population in a large forest in Thailand has tripled between 2007 and 2023, a conservation success. There had been an estimated 41 tigers; now there are 143.
"President Donald Trump posted video Tuesday [Oct 13, 2026] of the moments before a man was fatally mauled by a tiger after he jumped into its enclosure at a U.K. wildlife park.
“Don’t ever mess with nature!” Trump posted on his Truth Social page. Attached to his caption was a video of the moment William Chapman was attacked by a tiger after he entered its enclosure on Saturday. Chapman later died from his injuries.
In a callous followup post, Trump posted a video compilation of other attacks from tigers and lions."
Trump, 80, Posts Video Of Man Fatally Mauled By Tiger: 'Don't Ever Mess With Nature!' by Sebastian Murdock, Oct 13, 2026
