Teju Jagua

The hill above Yaguarón keeps its cave mouths half shut with thornscrub, and the people who live under it will still tell you which one you should not walk into. Cold air comes out of the rock in the afternoon, smelling of wet stone and old bat guano. Somewhere back in that dark, according to a story that has outlived every generation that told it, something enormous lies folded on itself, unable to turn around, and its eyes are burning.

The name says exactly what he is. Teju, lizard. Jagua, dog. He is a reptile the length of a fallen tree, his back armoured and dull gold where light finds it, and out of his shoulders grow seven dog heads that crowd one another for room. Each head faces a different quarter of the cave. Each shows its teeth at nothing. The eyes have no pupils; what sits in the sockets instead is fire, and it throws enough light to read the cave wall by. Some tellings give the heads different colours, black and red and yellow and blue. The country people around the hill mostly did not bother with seven at all and described one head, a single oversized dog’s skull on a lizard’s body, which is a good deal easier to picture and probably older.

Whichever count you take, the anatomy is a catastrophe. Seven skulls on one set of shoulders is not a design that walks. He drags. He cannot climb, cannot chase, cannot cross open ground at the speed of a man strolling, and the sources that make him a man-eater have to explain that he waits at the cave mouth and hauls what comes near him backwards into the dark. He could not run.

So he eats fruit, and he eats honey. His younger brother Jasy Jateré, the small blond one with the golden stick, brings him honeycomb and leaves it where the nearest head can reach. There is a version in which the brother also walks him down to the stream to drink and soak, which is the closest thing in Guaraní myth to taking the dog out. The comb goes down whole. The heads that are not eating go on watching the entrance, and the light from them slides over the wet rock.

He came into the world at the head of a cursed litter. Tau, an evil spirit, wanted a girl called Keraná, daughter of Marangatú, who was so given to sleeping that her name means the sleeper. He took the shape of a handsome young man, courted her seven days, then tried to carry her off. Angatupyry, the spirit of good, fought him for seven days and lost to trickery. What followed was a curse: seven sons, all born at seven months, every one of them a monster, and seven griefs turned loose on the world alongside them, fear and pain and weeping and hunger and thirst and sickness and death. When the last was born the Pleiades came up as a warning to anyone watching the sky. Teju Jagua was the first and the most hideous, and Tupã, seeing what had been made, drew the ferocity out of him and left the horror.

That whole architecture, the parents, the curse, the tidy count of seven, reaches us in the shape one man gave it. Narciso R. Colmán, a Paraguayan poet who published as Rosicrán, brought out Ñande Ypy Kuéra in 1929, and it is his poem that fixed the monsters as a family with a genealogy, a hometown and a burial place. Colmán said so himself in his prologue: the work came out of his own imagination, set going by oddly shaped pebbles he had picked up in a cave on Cerro Tatukua. The creatures were older than the poem. The family was not.

In that poem the brothers die together. Porãsy, sister of the sage Tumé Arandú, offers herself as bait, tells Moñái she wants to marry him, and asks only that all his brothers attend. Moñái suggests holding it in Teju Jagua’s cave, since the eldest cannot leave home. She waits there ten days while the others are gathered. On the last night there is chicha and the monsters get drunk on it and go down one by one, and outside in the dark the whole village is closing a ring around the hill. Moñái wakes as she reaches the entrance, shouts treason, and winds his body around her, and Porãsy, understanding she is not getting out, screams at her people to seal it anyway. They roll a stone across the mouth and set the hill alight. The place near Yaguarón is still called Moñái Kuare.

Across the border the story is not that story at all. On the Uruguay river at Santo Tomé, in Corrientes, a folklorist took down a version from a boy of fifteen in 1952. A sacristan found a small creature while he was bathing and went back to feed it at the same hour every day, and it grew, and its body was like a snake and its head like a dog. The priests learned of it and locked him up. The next day, when no food came, the animal came up through the ground, went to the church, took the sacristan out of it, and neither of them was ever seen again. The gullies that run through the town are the furrow it ploughed on its way. The boy ended where the point of the tale is: the teyú yaguá protects the one who raises it. No curse in it, no brothers, no Tupã. It sits much closer to the Familiar, the diabolical animal kept in secret to make a man rich.

What he can do follows from where he lives. He is lord of the caverns and of everything the ground holds inside them, guardian of buried treasure, protector of fruit, and in the Yaguarón telling the shine on his hide comes from rolling in gold and cut stones. His roar shakes the hill and brings rock off the crest, and it is said to come with a black wind. Nobody can meet his stare and keep their sight; whoever looks goes blind and stays blind until they die. Against that stands everything the curse cost him. He is too heavy to travel, too badly assembled to fight, dependent on a brother for his supper, and tied to a hole in a hill that a village can block with a single stone. Fire finished him, and he did not die fighting. He died at a wedding party he was too slow to leave.

In 2016 palaeontologists working near São Francisco de Assis in southern Brazil published a nearly complete skull from rock about 250 million years old, a metre-and-a-half reptile with recurved teeth and nostrils set high on the snout, close to the root of the line that produced crocodiles, dinosaurs and birds. They named it Teyujagua paradoxa. It lay in the shallows at the edge of lakes and rivers, waiting for smaller things to come near the water.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Teju Jagua?

Teju Jagua is a monster of Guaraní mythology whose name means “dog lizard” in Guaraní. He is usually described as an enormous armoured lizard with seven dog heads and eyes that burn with fire instead of having pupils, although many rural tellings give him only one oversized dog’s head. He is the eldest of the seven cursed sons of Tau and Keraná.

Is Teju Jagua dangerous?

It depends on the version. In the best-known account Tupã stripped away his ferocity, leaving him calm and harmless, living on fruit and on wild honey brought to him by his brother Jasy Jateré. Other tellings around the hill of Yaguarón say he dragged victims into the caverns to swallow them, and nearly all agree that no one can meet his gaze without being blinded for life.

Where does Teju Jagua live?

He lives in caves, and Paraguayan tradition places him specifically in the caverns of the Cerro Yaguarón. He is called the lord of the caves and the guardian of the riches buried in the earth, and the gold and precious stones he rolls in are said to be why his hide shines. His body is too heavy and too badly built for him to leave.

How did Teju Jagua die?

He died when his own cave was sealed and set on fire. Porãsy, sister of the sage Tumé Arandú, lured Moñái into a marriage on condition that all seven brothers attend, and the wedding was held in Teju Jagua’s cave because he could not travel. Once the monsters were drunk, the villagers blocked the entrance with a stone and burned the hill, killing Porãsy along with them.

Was Teju Jagua invented by a poet?

Partly. The creature itself is older and appears in oral tradition on both sides of the Paraguay-Argentina border, including a Corrientes tale about a sacristan who raised one in secret. The framework that makes him the first of seven cursed brothers born to Tau and Keraná was given its definitive form by the Paraguayan poet Narciso R. Colmán in Ñande Ypy Kuéra (1929), and Colmán stated in his prologue that the poem came from his own imagination.

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Mbói Tu’ĩ, Moñái, Jasy Jatere, Kurupi, Ao Ao, Luison, Tupã, Pombero, Abaangui, Pleiades, Curupira, Iara, Mapinguari, Sachamama, Ladon