The word "nagual" has become famous far beyond Mexico, often with meanings that have little to do with its origin. To understand what it truly meant we have to go back to the Nahuatl sources, to Maya inscriptions and to the ethnography of contemporary Indigenous communities. What emerges is a conception of the person very different from the European one: a human being does not have a single soul, but is made up of several forces, some of them linked to the animal world.
The nahualli, the shape-shifting sorcerer
In the central Mexican sources gathered after the conquest, the word nahualli refers first of all to a person: the specialist able to transform into an animal. Bernardino de Sahagún describes the nahualli as sorcerers who could take the form of a jaguar, a turkey, an owl or a dog. The sources distinguish between the nahualli who used his power for the benefit of the community and the one who used it to cause harm.
The same term also referred to the animal form assumed. The god Tezcatlipoca, lord of sorcerers, had the jaguar as his nahualli, its spotted coat recalling the starry sky.
The tonalli, the heat of destiny
Alongside the nahualli, Nahuatl sources speak of the tonalli. The word derives from the root denoting the heat of the sun and, at the same time, the day of the calendar. The tonalli was a vital force concentrated above all in the head, which a child received in connection with the day of birth in the 260-day ritual calendar. For this reason a person's character and destiny were linked to the sign of his or her day.
The Mexican historian Alfredo López Austin, in his studies of the Nahua body and ideology, reconstructed a model with three main animistic entities:
| Entity | Seat in the body | Function |
|---|---|---|
| Tonalli | head | vital heat, destiny, link with the calendar |
| Teyolia | heart | consciousness, memory, lasting vitality |
| Ihiyotl | liver | passions, emotions, breath force |
The tonalli could leave the body, for example during sleep or after a sudden fright. In many communities in Mexico people still speak today of "soul loss" following a fright, and address it with rites of calling back led by traditional specialists. These are cultural categories, which the anthropologist describes within their context.
The way of the Classic Maya
One of the most interesting advances in Maya epigraphy concerns precisely this theme. In the late 1980s scholars read a frequent glyph as way, a word that in Mayan languages denotes sleeping, dreaming and transforming, and also the animal double. On many painted vessels of the Classic period fantastic creatures appear accompanied by this glyph: jaguars wearing scarves, dancing skeletons, serpents with the body of a deer. These were the way, the companions or spiritual forms of rulers and dynasties.
This reading showed that ideas about the animal double are not a late invention, but have roots in the Classic period, more than a thousand years ago.
The chanul of the Tzotzil
Contemporary ethnography offers living examples. Among the Tzotzil Maya of the Chiapas highlands, every person has an animal companion, the chanul, which lives in a corral on the sacred mountain in the keeping of the ancestors. What happens to the chanul affects the person and vice versa. The strongest animals, such as the jaguar, belong to the most authoritative people; the smaller ones, such as the squirrel or the mouse, to those with less power.
In Tzeltal communities a related term, lab, is used, and similar concepts are found in many other languages of the region, each with its own nuances.
Modern misunderstandings
In the twentieth century the word "nagual" entered popular culture also through very successful books that presented a system of teachings attributed to an Indigenous sorcerer. Anthropologists have raised serious doubts about the reliability of those works, which do not match what historical sources and Indigenous communities say about the nahualli. Studio Esoterico Cornelio prefers to stay with the sources and with ethnography: the authentic tradition is already rich enough and does not need to be reinvented.
The deeper meaning
The ideas of nahual and tonal speak to us of an open person, bound to time, to animals and to the landscape. The individual is not an island: his or her vital force depends on the day of birth, on the ancestors who keep watch, and on relationships with the natural world. It is a vision that invites us to think of identity as a web of bonds.
In short
- In Nahuatl sources the nahualli is the sorcerer able to transform and also the animal form he assumes.
- The tonalli is a vital force tied to heat and to the day of birth in the 260-day calendar.
- López Austin described three Nahua animistic entities: tonalli, teyolia and ihiyotl.
- The Maya way glyph shows that the idea of the animal double already existed in the Classic period.
- Among the Tzotzil of Chiapas the chanul is still today the person's animal companion.
