Maya thought gave the sun a second form for the twelve hours it spends under the world. The night sun, the Jaguar God of the Underworld, is a feline face with a twisted cord between the eyes and a cruller-shaped ornament, and it appears on shields, on censers and on the walls of tombs. The sun passing through the underworld and the jaguar moving through the forest at night are the same idea told twice.
That reading explains a set of otherwise odd pairings. Jaguar imagery clusters with water, with caves and with the interior of the earth rather than with the sky, because the underworld is where the jaguar sun is. Caves in Maya and Olmec practice are entrances, and jaguar remains and jaguar iconography turn up in them.
The animal also marks a specific kind of authority. A king is not compared to a jaguar because he is fierce; he is a jaguar because he goes where others cannot and returns. Accession scenes show rulers on jaguar thrones, and several dynasties carry the animal in the name, at Tikal, at Yaxchilan and elsewhere.
None of this survives as a living cult. What survives is the shamanic reading in Amazonia, which is not a remnant of the Mesoamerican one but a parallel development from the same animal, and the jaguar's continuing presence in the art and the politics of the states that now hold its range.