Maya

Mayan civilization developed in what is contemporary Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, and Honduras. During the Classic period (250 to 950 ce), Mayans built magnificent pyramided cities of stone, produced sculptures and murals, wove complex multicolored brocaded cotton textiles, painted hieroglyphic paper books, and decorated polychrome pottery. The sheer geographical size of the Mayan civilization, together with a history of warring kingdoms, provides a complex picture of ancient Mayan sexuality and gender.

A connection between biological reproduction and gender identity is fundamental to Mayan thought. Early colonial records attest to a fluid androgynous gender ideology. Classic Maya depictions of kings dressed in beaded net skirts represent performances of these gender-encompassing primordial characters. Monumental images also represent members of ruling families as complementary pairs engaged in rituals requiring totalizing qualities like those of dual-gendered creator deities and ancestors. These politically motivated representations deemphasize the bodies of social women and display the bodies of social men. Women's costumes consist of cotton textiles, woven by women in house compounds. Men's costumes employ forest products, including bark cloth, animal skins and skulls. Maleness is further marked by exposing the body, revealing a lack of signs of female sexuality, and by the wearing of a loincloth with a painted image of a World Tree with its branches folded down, implying the possibility of an upward unfolding of the branches as a metaphor for erection.

Monumental carvings featuring women legitimize ruling lineages and cement alliances through marriage. Although there is no evidence that women passed ruler-ship down to other women within their matrilineage, there is evidence that royal women in the cities of Palenque, Naranjo, and Tikal served as regents for their underage sons. Lady Six Sky, the daughter of the king of Dos Pilas, moved to Naranjo on August 27, 682. Five years later she bore a male child and assumed the prerogatives of kingship, portraying herself on monuments performing key calendrical rituals, and trampling captives in the manner of warrior-kings. As queen regnant she ruled then co-ruled with her son for many years creating a new dynasty at Naranjo. This pattern of rulership was repeated at Copan where two of the three founding tombs contain the remains of females.

Other monumental images show men with shields and other insignia of warrior status and women holding weaving implements and ceramic bowls. This suggests that the elite gender system may have been that of "complementary dualism," in which a male-female pair constitute a dynamic totality where each person plays an equally important, but different, role. There is a marked contrast between these monumental stone images and the small clay figurines and images used by non-ruling elites. The recognition of women's production recorded in small icons reflects the higher status of women, as a result of their labor, in non-ruling residential groups. During political centralization, women from ruling lineages appear to have lost social status while non-elite women did not.

According to oral and written creation stories, bisexual beings conceived the universe and gave birth to it. In the highlands of Guatemala and Mexico into the twenty-first century, priest-shamans of patrilineages (who are always male) are considered co-gendered "mother-fathers." This links them historically to elite Classic Maya monuments where male rulers wear a combination of feminine and masculine clothing. A similar co-gendered representation is found among contemporary male and female "day-keeper" shamans who embody and enact the masculine and feminine symbolic nature of mountains, volcanoes, and caves to divine the future and heal their clients using the ancient Mayan 260-day calendar.

During the Classic period, adult male gender was indicated by the use of a pictograph consisting of male genitalia as a title. Maleness was further sexualized in imagery showing the piercing of penises to produce blood for rituals and joining men together. Phallocentric murals in the caves at Naj Tunich, Guatemala, show two nude males embracing, one of them marked by hairstyle and ornament as socially female. In the sixteenth century, the conquistadors found clay figurines depicting men engaging in "sodomy." For Spaniards of that time the difference between the active and passive sex roles was central; the active partner was viewed as the victor and the passive partner as the loser in warfare. A Chontal Maya town was named Cuylonemiquia, "the killing of the passive partner in sodomy." Here space was apparently used as a marker of sodomy and conquest. In an anonymous Inquisition petition, a Yucatec Maya place-name, Pencuyut, or "fornicating coyote," may have been a symbolic representation of the Nahuas, or Aztecs, as active sexual partners with passive Mayan men. In this hybrid colonial context warfare was linked to sexual desire, indicating the difference between "self" and "other."

Coming-of-age rituals in which royal boys between the ages of six and thirteen were given ear ornaments are recorded at Palenque, Naranjo, Bonampak, Tikal, and Piedras Negras. During the colonial period boys and girls eligible for marriage were assembled once a year for a coming-of-age ceremony called "the descent of the gods." A Mayan priest and four elders, who embodied the Chacs or rain deities responsible for fertility, met in the courtyard of the sponsor's home. After the ceremony the boys were sequestered in a house on the edge of the village where they painted themselves black and participated in ball games and cultivated cornfields. Girls returned to their homes where their mothers taught them to spin and weave, raise domestic animals, tend fruit trees, grow herbs, and prepare food. Puberty rituals are observed among the contemporary lowland Maya, but only by girls. These ceremonies, which take place at menarche, are presided over by shamans who place cacao beans and chili peppers on the altar to symbolize the role of gender in the Maya cosmos. (Cacao beans are elongate with a longitudinal crease resembling a vulva. The pods are purple-red and seep white sap. Chilis and penises are interchangeable in Mayan jokes that play on the similarity between the sensation of intense heat caused by placing chili peppers in the mouth and the genital heat of sexual arousal and intercourse.)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Joyce, Rosemary A. 2001. "Negotiating Sex and Gender in Classic Maya Society." In Gender in Pre-Hispanic America, ed. Cecelia F. Klein. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

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Sigal, Peter. 2000. From Moon Goddesses to Virgins: The Colonization of Yucatecan Maya Sexual Desire. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Tedlock, Barbara. 1992. Time and the Highland Maya, revised edition. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Tedlock, Barbara. 2004. "Gender in Shamanism." In Vol. I of Shamanism: An Encyclopedia of World Beliefs, Practices, and Culture. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC CLIO.

Tedlock, Barbara. 2005. The Woman in the Shaman's Body: Reclaiming the Feminine in Religion and Medicine. New York: Bantam.

Tedlock, Dennis, trans. 1985. The Popol Vuh: The Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glories of Gods and Kings. New York: Simon & Schuster.

                                          Barbara Tedlock