Goddesses and the Divine Feminine by Ruether Rosemary

Author:Ruether, Rosemary
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press

FIGURE 41

The Aztec Earth Goddess Coatlicue, fifteenth or sixteenth century. (Museo Nacional de Antropologia, Mexico City; photo: Werner Forman / Art Resource, NY)

The second story took place in the migration period. On their way to discovering the place of their capital, Tenochtitlán, Huitzilopochtli abandoned his Goddess sister Malinalxoch, described as an evil sorceress, while she was sleeping. When she woke up and found herself abandoned by her brother, Malinalxoch led her followers to the mountain Texcaltepetl, where they established themselves. She bore a child named Copil to the king of Malinalco and thus became the founder of a rival city-state.36

What do these stories of the conquered or abandoned divine sister mean for Aztec gender relations? On one level, the story of the defeat of Coyolxauhqui and the four hundred brothers is a cosmological story of the daily defeat of the stars by the rising sun. But it also seems to reflect wars with rival cities that the Aztecs subdued to build an empire in Mesoamerica. Some of these cities may have had powerful female rulers, but it may also be that the Aztecs represented conquered cities as rival, conquered sisters.37 Recent excavation of the temple center at Xochitecatl, a sacred site that flourished between 650 and 850 CE, resulted in the discovery of a large group of figurines, mostly female. The figurines express the female life cycle, from pregnant women and women with children in their arms and babies in cradles, to young women orantes and priestesses, to elderly women. At the center of this group of females is the stunning figure of a priestess warrior seated on a throne or palanquin, wearing a helmet and holding a scepter and shield of her office as governor (fig. 43).38

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