The Flower and the Scorpion: Sexuality and Ritual in Early Nahua Culture

Abstract

In The Flower and the Scorpion Pete Sigal carries out fascinating and important research that embraces an interdisciplinary methodology based on current scholarly trends such as postcolonial studies and the New Philology in Mesoamerican ethnohistory studies, also tied to social history. Sigal analyzes a wealth of pre-Columbian and colonial written documentation in Nahuatl and Spanish to understand the Nahua worldview on sexuality before and after the Spanish colonization. Using his linguistic knowledge and his own translations, the author’s method for assessing the social and cultural changes brought about by the Spanish conquest is to listen to the discourses of indigenous commoners, which show the ways that colonialism intersects with the histories of sex and gender.Sigal’s work is divided in eight chapters: “The Bath,” “Trash,” “Sin,” “The Warrior Goddess,” “The Phallus and the Broom,” “The Homosexual,” “Sex,” and “Mirrors.” These titles illustrate the themes of his study. He examines fertility rituals depicted in codices and other written primary sources to show how Nahua concepts of gender and sexuality followed a coherence alien to Christian thought. The concept of sexual relations for the Nahua at the time of the Spanish conquest belonged to a larger set of practices that promoted fertility as a source of world survival. These practices were also linked to the maintenance of the political system and to the practice of war. In the Nahua worldview, according to Sigal’s research, life and pleasure of different kinds, including sexual, had to be controlled because any excess would tip the balance from harmony to chaos, from life to death.The term tlazolli is commonly translated as “trash,” but the term carries more significance than that, according to Pete Sigal. Tlazolli consists of bits and pieces that once were part of a whole but through the process of decay, decomposition, or digestion are disconnected from their primary sources. The term tlazolli complex, coined by the author and central to his analysis, refers to the association of those deteriorating elements to other things that are opposite — such as clean and tidy — and at times complementary in the pragmatism of everyday life. However, the tlazolli complex is as importantly central in rites of fertility, in which sexuality and concepts of gender escape Western translation. Tlazolli is also a formative framework that helps the author to explain changes in Nahua understanding of sexuality. Using Victor Turner’s concept of liminality, Sigal proposes that, by performing liminality in rites of fertility that formed the tlazolli complex, “social distinctions important to everyday life become erased to create a position, an individual, that is ‘betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial’ ” (p. 22). Ritual transformations of individuals and the disappearance of quotidian structures helped the community to continue to perpetuate itself in an orderly fashion. As the Spanish colony became more established and to aid Christian conversion, the tlazolli complex was inaccurately and negatively translated. Misunderstood as trash, dirt, and symbolically evil because the rituals combined human sacrifice and gender ambiguities not in tune with Christian beliefs, the tlazolli complex became associated with sin, a category alien to Nahuas. Therefore, as Sigal convincingly shows, during the first two centuries after the conquest of Mexico, even with Christianity as the moral model, practices and beliefs related to sexuality were still perceived differently by Nahua and Spaniards.The scholarship offered by this study is sound, enlightening, and interesting. This work contributes to our understanding of Nahua perceptions of gender and sexuality according to autochthonous frames, and how they adjusted to the demands of Christianity. The Flower and the Scorpion is clearly written and very enjoyable to read. It is an important addition for scholars interested in Mesoamerican studies, in Nahua sexuality and gender practices, and in Aztec studies. Because of Sigal’s clear and interesting style, it will also appeal to students and to a nonspecialist audience.