Moon Goddesses and Sex and Conquest

Conquest and colonization entail more than battles with swords and obsidian points, more than establishing a cabildo and asserting legitimacy. There follows a second, darker conquest: the colonization of sexual desire, the body, and finally the mind itself.

Pete Sigal’s From Moon Goddesses to Virgins: The Colonization of Yucatecan Maya Sexual Desire (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), reveals that this reality of the conquest was fascinatingly complicated. Maya forms endured and persisted and were hybridized, colonizing the gods of the colonizers even as the Maya were colonized. The Spanish tried to inscribe their notion of sin onto Maya culture, but it took a long time—and even when it did, sin was something that displeased the gods, not something that was, for lack of a better word, sinful. This is just one example of the hybrid colonial culture that was created amongst the Maya and the Spanish. The Virgin Mary Moon Goddess was a hybrid creation of the Maya, where they reinscribed the Catholic mother of Jesus as a powerful goddess. This reinterpretation of Mary allowed preconquest ideas about divinity to persist into the colonial era. Moon Goddesses deals very sensitively with the relationships between sex, war, power, conquest, and colonialism.

Richard Trexler’s Sex and Conquest: Gendered Violence, Political Order, and the European Conquest of the Americas (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1995) is much more heavy-handed. He fixates on the state, uses words like “sissy” (Trexler xi) and makes sweeping generalizations far too often (e.g. “warfare as the incubator of civil institutions” (Trexler 140). Trexler presents man-man sexual acts in the way that the Spanish would have understood them. And he does an excellent job of linking war and rape with ideas of power and masculinity. But Trexler’s subject is basically the berdache. He says that his “first and primary purpose is to describe and analyze American homosexual practices and the male transvestism often associated with them, as the Iberians heard of these practices during their original contacts with the many peoples of what would come to be called Latin America” (Trexler 2). Yet he includes the Zuni (Trexler 116,120,123), the Iroquois (Trexler 129) and any number of other groups scattered across the hemisphere. He also says the berdache is a ubiquitous institution across native America (Trexler 121), but this is debatable. Sigal, for example, discusses Trexler (whom he compliments) but Sigal says “there is only scattered evidence of a Maya equivalent to the berdache” (Sigal 202). Additionally, Trexler asserts, compared with Europeans, an “at least allegedly more misogynistic attitude of Amerindian males toward their females” (Trexler 172), which is a problematic notion at best. But Trexler is certainly correct that “Europeans had long imagined conquest in gender terms” (Trexler 175).

Sigal reveals that gender is so much more complicated than all this! Sigal’s study of Maya gender in the colonial period reveals that people did not have an identity based on sexuality—gay, straight, lesbian, bisexual, etc… In reality, boundaries were more fluid and complex. Maya curing rituals depict tarantula representing a vagina might use its penis to cure the sick. The Moon Goddess is the perfect example of a complicated, fluid, classification-defying, powerful, gender-blurring goddess. And a goddess she was!

Trexler also says that in the indigenous world, “ high was male and low was female” and he uses the Book of Chilam Balam to show that the Itzá subordinated the Maya and became “older brother” (Trexler 81). But Sigal uses the same sources and shows us that the Moon Goddess was a colonizing goddess from Itzá, operating in a parallel gender structure in which her power was equal to or greater than the male gods who she had sex with (and sometimes penetrated). The Moon Goddess was female (although she played with gender quite a bit!), she was powerful, she penetrated other gods. One could even argue that she penetrated the Virgin Mary, as they merged. All of this is so much more complicated than the macho, misogynistic, male-homosexual-rape-obsessed world that Trexler describes. At the end of the day, much of history is messy and complicated, and cannot be packaged into neat conceptual categories.