At the execution ground the sword breaks in two, the spear falls to pieces, and the strangled princess lies still — and then "a tiger leapt into the execution ground," scattered the executioners, and bore the body off into the pine-forest. So the man-to-tiger shape enters the record not as a curse but as an errand of mercy. In the Chinese Miao Shan legend, gathered in Myths & Legends of China (published 1922), the beast is a disguise worn by a spirit. The Jade Emperor's order had been plain: at the moment of the princess's death, "transform yourself into a tiger, and bring her body to the pine-wood." Later the same t'u-ti (a local earth-spirit, the Guardian of the Soil) is told to "take the form of a tiger" and carry the weary Miao Shan to Hsiang Shan; when she offers herself to be devoured, the creature answers, "I am not a real tiger, but the Guardian of the Soil of Hsiang Shan." The tiger here is a mask over a god, and it goes "like a flash of lightning".

Where the Chinese witness makes the tiger a servant of heaven, the comparative shelf makes it a dread of the flesh. In Primitive Culture (first published 1871), the English anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917) sets down the belief plainly. Among the Garo hill-tribes, "transformation into a tiger" names a kind of madness in which a man "walks like a tiger, shunning society"; the Khonds of Orissa say a sorcerer becomes a man-killing tiger with "one of the man’s four souls going out to animate the bestial form." Tylor's most vivid page belongs to the Abipones of South America, where a threatened sorcerer needs only to begin to roar: the women cry that "his whole body is beginning to be covered with tiger-spots!" that his nails are growing, and they will not be reasoned out of it — "Artificial tigers we do fear, because they can neither be seen nor killed by us."

The god borrows the tiger to save a life; the sorcerer borrows it to take one. Which fear is older — the beast that carries you home, or the neighbor who wears its skin?