Sexuality, religion, and power

Both From Moon Goddess to Virgin and Sex and Conquest by Pete Sigal and Richard Trexler, respectively, are the product of fine research, scholarship, and (how to phrase it?) articulation. That is, both works examine issues, such as gender and sexuality, which are not easily classifiable, or at least not easily accessible to even the educated non-specialist. The careful elucidation required to effectively examine what John Locke termed “mixed modes” (nebulous terms that can hold different meanings to different users) is admirable enough; but this alone would not, in my view, give these two works the credit and audience they are due. Sigal and Trexler successfully incorporate gender and sexuality into the other spheres, such as politics, power, and religion, that can make gender and sexuality a central facet of historical investigation, rather than a mere adjunct to “real” history.

Pete Sigal’s work focuses on the evolution of the Mayan religious worldview (a word, admittedly, I throw about with to much frequency; I simply cannot think of a better term). As Sigal phrases the “religious conquest” of the Maya, “[T]he ways in which Maya people made sense of their world were colonized and forever altered” (xiv). Crucial to understanding this shift is this simple dichotomy between the Maya and Catholic understandings of sexuality. For the Maya, “sexual desire was placed in a cultural framework centered around ritual,” whereas for the Spanish Catholics “sexual desire was placed in a framework related to sin” (xiv). Sigal seeks to under stand the relationship between desire and power in the Mayan indigenous religion(s) and in the resulting hybrid faiths that emerged form the syncretism. Sigal argues, convincingly, that sexual desires did not, and do not, exist without social constructs, and lays solid framework for discussing Maya sexual acts and ideas (7). Moreover, the “sacred sphere” was integral to the life of the Maya. Indeed, “Upon a child’s birth, sacred diviners told kin what the child’s life had in store for him or her” (19). This form of predestination enhances the ritual aspects of communal worship and, not incidentally, helps to place human sacrifice (among other things) in a more manageable context.

Sigal’s notable achievement, however, and the primary purpose of this book, is his analysis of how two central feminine figures in Maya and Catholic religious ideology combine to become something both recognizable and alien to both cultures. The Moon Goddess is an inherently sexual creature, a desire that crosses gender lines and affects both men and women. She is simultaneously a maternal being, and there is no contradiction in that: the mother Moon Goddess derives her power, her sacredness, from the renewal of the sexual act. Needless to say, this idea is anathema to the Spaniards, for whom the Virgin is not only the mother of God, but a figure whose reverence derives in no small part from the fact that she is “ever-virgin”—eternally chaste, forever demure and inviolate (101). The result is curious (and, I admit, one that I do not fully understand: the Virgin Mary becomes a figure that is a guide and intercessor; but the Moon Goddess did not simply disappear. “Like the desire for the saints,” Sigal writes with admirable understatement, “the concept of the Virgin Mary Moon Goddess perhaps pushed Catholicism to its limits” (115).

If Sigal’s task is difficult, Trexler’s is perhaps more so. Sex and Conquest is an effort worthy of emulation, one that seeks to classify and describe attitudes, practices, and identities (including self-identities) as they relate to topics that may be difficult to articulate, let alone understand, and to do so with a dearth of both Spanish and indigenous sources.

“Sexuality defines gender,” writes Trexler, “a discourse that is about power relations” (2). To that end, Trexler focuses on sexuality, particularly male homosexuality, as integral to both social and political power prior to and during the Conquest era. Key to his study is an examination of attitudes toward male homosexual behavior as vehicles for classifying the conquered as the proverbial “Other.” Trexler takes the long view of history, arguing, convincingly, that ancient examples of homosexual activity served the purpose of cementing power relationships, just as heterosexual unions throughout history have been used for the purposes of dealing with issues of property.

Central to Trexler’s analysis in the figure of the berdache, a position that has no exact equivalent, to my knowledge, in modern Western history (certainly not in colonial American or United states history, although apparently in native North American cultures)—that is, a socially acceptable lifelong transvestite, “biological males that appeared to be women and who performed women’s tasks” (67).

Trexler, to his credit, does not shy from making broader observations about sexuality and its relation to culture and society. In particular, his discussion of child-raising and gendered roles in children, and his comments on the controversial topic of homosexuality’s innateness or construction is worth remembering, considering the social issues of modern America (85). In short, as I have mentioned in this blog and elsewhere, neither work is accessible through a single reading, and both have much insight to offer, not only about the period of the Conquest, but about universal human behavior and the varieties of life.