#nahuals

I finished reading The Magic and Mysteries of Mexico by Lewis Spence today. The word nagual can mean a lot of different things: Sometimes it refers to a familiar or spirit guardian, other times it refers to a shapeshifter, sometimes it refers to someone’s spiritual double, sometimes it refers to a wizard with any number of abilities. I wonder if what’s going on here is that there were like a dozen different distinct paranormal things in Mexico (some different entirely, others different interpretations of the same thing) and the Spanish chroniclers and missionaries just slapped the word ‘nagual’ on all of them as an inclusive label and now no-one knows what it actually definitively is.