For anyone in the Chicago anthropology department in the 1970s,’80s, and ’90s, The fire of the jaguar holds a legendary status. I mean this in the almost literal sense: it was wondrous; it had strange and awesome powers; no one was entirely sure if it really existed. Terry refused to publish it. Or even to show it around. Yet the very fact of its hiddenness made it a kind of talisman of secret potency.