![]()
Chapter 1
Imagining Cihuacoatl: Masculine Rituals, Nahua Goddesses and the Texts of the Tlacuilos
Pete Sigal
Cihuacoatl: The savage serpent woman, ill-omened and dreadful, brought men misery. For it was said: âShe gives men the hoe and the tumpline. Thus she forces men [to work]â.
This description, written in Nahuatl in a late sixteenth-century text, the Florentine Codex, authored by a Franciscan friar and his indigenous aides, speaks of an important Nahua goddess, conceptualised in the pre-conquest Nahua universe alternately and concurrently as a feared deity, a defeated woman and a cross-dressed man.1 Here, in her post-conquest iteration, she becomes only the feared goddess, the one forcing men to work (elsewhere the same text describes sacrifices performed to satisfy her voracious appetite for human hearts). Indeed, pre-conquest images of Cihuacoatl suggest that Nahuas, the indigenous peoples of central Mexico, greatly feared her. Cihuacoatl, the dreaded serpent woman, presented Nahua men with a challenge: she forced them into a life of drudgery. She also could take their lives away; she could present them with certain death as she feasted upon their hearts, for âshe had a huge, open mouth and ferocious teeth. The hair on her head was long and bulkyâ. Thus she devoured men. But still âshe was clad in womanly garb â skirt, blouse and mantle â all whiteâ.2
In Nahua gender ideology, Cihuacoatlâs nature as a feared individual who could kill upon a whim and who forced individuals to work signified a powerful masculine individual. Yet her attire signified femininity. Cihuacoatlâs aesthetics seem to us, as they seemed to the Catholic priests and friars who noted her appearance, confusing: a jumble of the masculine and the feminine â coming from a society that we believe rigorously separated masculine from feminine roles.3 We will see that the relationship between sixteenth-century Nahua notions of gender and sexuality allowed, and even required, Cihuacoatl and other Nahua goddesses to manifest themselves as bundles of attributes that in daily life could never connect to an individual woman, no matter how powerful that woman may be. These goddesses thus transgress our imagined boundaries, not just between gender and sexuality but also between human and divine.
Need we know if Cihuacoatl and the other fertility goddesses discussed in this chapter are goddesses rather than gods? Is it important to recall that the term teotl (âgodâ) had no gender, or that Nahuatl does not contain gendered pronouns? This certainly begs an answer to a different question: how did the Nahuas understand gender and sexuality?4 I argue here that Nahuas related sexuality to fertility, a binary division between moderation and excess, and a concept of ritual that suspended daily rules on sexual activity. One wonders too if, while in everyday affairs a strict gender division was usually imposed, in ritual life this may not have been true. The gods and goddesses, who appear as a result of and within ritual, would never have to follow those rules, so the fertility goddesses did not follow the strict gender divisions often applied in daily life. Nahuas viewed Cihuacoatl as a warrior deity, but one who would be likely to play a major role in particular rituals and in childbirth; and they imagined another fertility goddess, Tlazolteotl (the teotl of tlazolli, âtrashâ), as a highly sexual deity who also consistently engaged in battle with her enemies.5 This connection between gender and sexuality, in which the god(desse)s, beings that exceed our grammatical markers, do not adhere to quotidian principles, speaks to the problem of accepting Gayle Rubinâs battle call for separating gender from sexuality as a given. Instead, in this chapter I argue for using Rubinâs formulation as a starting point for reconsidering the ways in which we understand concepts of gender and sexuality as organising principles.
The imagining and reimagining of Cihuacoatl relates to religiosity, colonialism, gender and sexuality in the early colonial period in Mexico. Cihuacoatl complicates the modern notions in which we separate human from god, man from woman and religious from secular. In this chapter, I will discuss the importance of Cihuacoatl and other related god(desse)s to the maintenance of Nahua politics and culture both before and after the Spanish conquest. In order to understand the roles that these god(desse)s played in Nahua society, we need to develop theoretical and methodological tools that go beyond Rubinâs call for a theory of sexuality.
Separating gender from sexuality: the Nahua case
Gender affects the operation of the sexual system, and the sexual system has had gender-specific manifestations. But although sex and gender are related, they are not the same thing, and they form the basis of two distinct arenas of social practice ⌠It is essential to separate gender and sexuality analytically to more accurately reflect their separate social existence.6
Gayle Rubin
The call sent out for chapters for the current volume intrigued me as it harkened back to an article I had first read as an undergraduate, cited repeatedly as a graduate student, and that I now assign to my undergraduates. In âThinking Sexâ, Gayle Rubin provocatively argues that we must delineate gender from sexuality, and in particular that we must not assume that the theoretical tools feminism uses to analyse gender will be sufficient for the task of analysing sexuality. Such a critique at the time I read it seemed to me fair enough, and since Rubinâs article came out twenty-seven years ago, many theorists, particularly those involved in queer theory, have answered her call.7
Still, when I began my research into indigenous concepts of sexuality from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, I became troubled by part of Rubinâs assertion. While sex and gender are not identical, and the Nahuas would not have conflated the analytical terrain that these two concepts represent, the boundaries between the two, in this pre-modern, non-western culture, need significantly more analysis than Rubinâs argument allows.8 How can the Nahua situation speak to Rubinâs theorising of a separation between gender and sexuality? I suggest that Rubinâs formulation can only be a provocative starting point, full of contradictions, when applied to the Nahuas. Cihuacoatl presents one example: was she a god or a goddess? Was she human or divine? Was she chaste or sexual? As we will see, neither Cihuacoatl nor any of the other Nahua god(desse)s can be defined easily based on these binary divisions.
As many scholars have shown, Nahua notions of gender at the time of the conquest incorporated both âgender complementarityâ and âgender hierarchyâ. In the complementary realm, we find symbolic equivalences (women who died in childbirth were equated the same high status as men who died in battle), quotidian senses of purpose (consent of both husband and wife generally was required to make all major household decisions) and material realities (networks of commoner families teamed together to make sure all could survive economically, with men generally engaging in farming activities and women generally controlling the markets to sell the produce from the land). Regarding gender hierarchy, we find that men controlled the bulk of the political system, the highest levels of religious office and the esteemed title of âwarriorâ. The gender system of course changed after the Spanish conquest but, as many recent commentators have noted, these changes were not nearly as radical as earlier scholars had presumed.9
Nahuas connected these concepts of gender with related notions of sexuality, even if they did not term these things âsexualityâ. Nahua nobles and commoners before the Spanish conquest related their sexual lives with rituals of fertility and warfare. Still, Nahuas did not have a discreet category they called âsexâ. Instead, they constituted a variety of relations as âcategories of the intimateâ in which the human couple engaged in bodily activities related to fertility. These activities included categories that we would invest with sexual meaning: vaginal and anal intercourse, manual and oral stimulation of male and female genitals, imaginary conditions designed to allude to these activities and stimulate a genital response, and the use of non-bodily objects in these actions.10 The Nahuas also had concepts of âgoodâ and âbadâ sex and rape and other forms of sexual violence. Yet these things that I have called âcategories of the intimateâ also included activities that we would not consider sexual: the ritual killing of humans and animals, burning of maize, incense and other items, letting of blood and sweeping houses, streets and other areas. Nahua categories linked all of these activities together and suggested that they formed a part of the matrix of sacrifice. Much Nahua thought at the time of the Spanish conquest envisioned sexual relations as elements of a larger set of ritual practices designed to promote fertility: of gods, humans, animals and the earth.11 A cultural history of these rituals also shows that Nahuas closely linked the maintenance and expansion of the political system and the structures of governance with fertility rites.12
Two main principles organised Nahua thoughts about the sexual. First, sexual behaviour related directly to the fertility rituals, ceremonies large and small, in the many realms described above, promoting the notion that everything and everybody must exude fertility in order for the community to survive. Second, an individualâs sexual possibilities divided between those acts...
