Predating modern cat memes by thousands of years, humans have always found a way to commemorate our feline companions. The Magner Collection showcases a few superb Pre-Columbian ceramic pottery pieces to excite any cat lover.

These ceramic artifacts likely originate from the Pre-Columbian civilization known as the Chavín Culture (900 BC – 250 BC). Located approximately 10,000 feet above sea level, this ancient archaeological site is fixed in the high Andean valley. In 400 BC, The Chavín culture emerged as a “crucial religious and ceremonial hub… strategically positioned at the crossroads of trade routes, enabling interactions between diverse cultures from the Ecuadorian border to southern Peru” [1]. Defining characteristics of this early civilization note the “intensification of the religious cult, the appearance of ceramics closely related to the ceremonial centers, the improvement of agricultural techniques and the development of metallurgy and textiles”. [2]

The Chavín people are renowned for their feline reverence as portrayed by their idols, mythology, artwork, and engravings. 1970s archaeological studies of the Chavín culture reveal their ailurophilic ways (ailouros, which means “cat,” and the suffix -phile, meaning “lover”)! The Chavín’s shamans were often depicted as “half-human, half-feline monster”, “Jaguar-Men”, or as “ancestral Jaguar(s)” [3]. Chavín idols, less often, also depict hybrid human-avian and human-crocodilian figures. The shaman is master of the magical, natural, and human world. These realities blend into a fluid state that a shaman can enter, leave, and embody simultaneously. The combination of shamanism and the ideas closely related to “man-animal transformation” are inextricable to the Chavín culture’s concept of religion.

I have attempted to categorize our two pre-Columbian ceramic cats according to Kano’s 1979 classification of the material:

Magner M620
Jaguar jug: (i) Shillacoto Modeled Type: Black surface colors, generally realistic, details of the face described by incision, eye-brows and nose are depicted by a single U-shape, grooved incision, nostrils made by dots inside incision, the mouth is big and rectangular with teeth showing, teeth depicted as continuous design of interlocking triangles (Kano, 17). The whiskers present on Magner M620 are not accounted for nor is its spiral tail.

Magner M636
Miscellaneous Types (PL. XII) “representations of the human face with extremely feline characteristics. [Scholars] were justified in speculating that these may have been representations of shamans (Kano, 21).

Since early civilization, people have adored and treated their cats as if the whole world revolved around them. Cats caught onto this reverence and now also believe the world revolves around them. The cosmology of the Chavín people actually did worship felines as such. Lanzón, the Chavín’s supreme deity, depicts an anthropomorphic jaguar with a feline head, distinct fangs, and a human torso. Click here to see a full 3D scan of the Lanzon. Thought to be the foundation of subsequent Mesoamerican jaguar cults, the Chavín’s repeated artistic representation of jaguars and felines exhibits deep reverence for the characteristics of these animals.

These early representations of mythological feline creatures continue to inspire national pride. In 1963, Peru released a stamp featuring Chavín art of a mythological feline.

[1] Chavín de Huántar Is Peru’s Urban Center
[2] Wikipedia – Chavín culture
[3] Tello, Julio C. “Discovery of the Chavín Culture in Peru.” American Antiquity, vol. 9, no. 1, 1943, pp. 135–60.
[4] KANO, C. (1979). THE ORIGINS OF THE CHAVÍN CULTURE. Studies in Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology, p.7, 21, 141.