This is part of Wednesday series on Goddess spirituality and political activism.
Warning: this one’s pretty depressing. The story of Mayahuel , the Aztec Goddess of the maguey (agave) plant, could be seen as a joyful triumph over conservative repression. Instead it got me thinking about horizontal hostility, and oppressed people eating their own.
Mayahuel, frog Goddess with 400 breasts, lay in heaven among 400 stars. Under the watchful eye of her grandmother, Tzitzimitl, she was perfectly protected, which is to say, she slept all day and all night. Tzitzimitl was aided by a group of young Gods who helped her to guard Mayahuel, keeping her from the dangers of freedom, and sex, and pleasure.
One of those young Gods was Ehacatl, snake God of the wind. When the others were away, he nudged Mayhuel awake with his breezy caress. Eye met eye, and heart met heart. Soon body met body, with such passion that the two lovers merged into a single tree. The tree had two branches: a leafy one on the God’s side, and a flowering one on the Goddess’s side. Their unity, and their happiness, was complete.
Then Tzitzimitl returned.
Furious that she no longer controlled her granddaughter, Tzitzimitl spoke the most monstrous of curses. The tree was rent in two, blackened and dead. Not satisfied, Tzitzimitl gathered together the young guardian Gods, and raged at them that they had failed. She tore off the branch that had once been Mayahuel, and thrust it in their faces. "Eat!" she shrieked at them. "Eat it!" Terrified, they obeyed.
After they left, Ehacatl revived in his serpent form. He gathered what little remained of his beloved – a few petals and twigs – and buried them in the earth. From her body grew the maguey plant, with its intoxicating juice.
Mayahuel thwarted her captor one last time, for she brings dangerous pleasure and out-of-control intoxication to any who would dare devour her now.
This story hits several different but interconnected notes for me, so I hope no one minds if I ramble far afield from the ancient Aztecs.
The general outline of this myth is very common, especially in the Americas: the Goddess dies, but her body becomes a plant that’s vital to her people. Usually it’s a mother Goddess who willingly – or at least inevitably – gives her body to become a food crop. (There are some male versions as well, including Tuna , the Polynesian eel God.) But here the Goddess is a young lover, and the plant is an intoxicant. There is a similar Andean story about the coca plant: the Goddess Cocamama was said to be a promiscuous woman who was literally pulled apart by her lovers. In both cases, we have a woman punished for her sexuality.
There are a lot of obvious things that can be said about the right-wing love of control, particularly when it comes to women’s bodies and sexuality. Which is where I thought I was going when I started writing about Mayahuel. But something bothers me here: the one who mutilated the Goddess was another woman.
WTF was Tzitzimitl’s problem?
In cultures where literal mutilation of women is practiced, the person performing it is often a woman. See, for instance, foot-binding (now mercifully defunct) in China, or female genital mutilation (FGM) , which is still practiced in many parts of the world, particularly some parts of Africa and the Middle East. (Although sometimes called "female circumcision," FGM could more accurately be compared with castration.)
Part of the explanation is what Mary Daly calls the "token torturer" phenomenon. An oppressive system works better if there’s a layer of deniability between the controller and the controlled. This is why politicians like to have "a few bad apples" to blame for torture, or occupying armies set up a Vichy government. FGM has everything to do with patriarchal control of female sexuality, and it will stop when men in those cultures are willing to marry unmutilated women. But the practice of having female enforcers means that men can dismiss as "women’s business" that has nothing to do with them.
Obligatory troll disclaimer: No, I don’t think that relations between the sexes can usually be compared with an occupying army and the people they colonize. But if we were discussing a female-controlled system where men’s marriageability and economic security depended on being castrated, that wouldn’t be a bad metaphor.
Please note that I am not exonerating the women who pass this horror down to the next generation, nor do I think it’s a coincidence that the midwife who does the mutilation gets financial benefits for it. (Alice Walker’s powerful novel Possessing the Secret of Joy has more thoughts on this, from the POV of both the female perpetrator and a woman who initially accepted being mutilated.) Sometimes even a small amount of money, power or prestige and convince an oppressed person to collude against their own.
But there’s another factor at work here.
In her memoir Do They Hear You When You Cry , Fauziya Kassinndja describes growing up in a Togolese area where some tribes practiced FGM and some didn’t. As a child, her father saw his sister nearly die after being mutilated. He was so horrified that he chose to marry a woman from a tribe that didn’t practice FGM, and to keep his own daughters intact. Fauziya was the only daughter still unmarried when her father died. Custody passed to her aunt, who promptly arranged a marriage for Fauziya and made plans to have her mutilated. With some help from her married sisters, Fauziya escaped to the US and began a long court battle for political refugee status.
The aunt who tried to have Fauziya mutilated was the same one who had nearly died from her own experience with FGM.
There’s probably an official name for the phenomenon that I call "fraternity hazing syndrome." It’s the mindset that says, "If I suffered, then you must also suffer so that I won’t feel like mine was for nothing." Fauziya’s aunt found it easier to subject her niece to life-threatening bodily harm, than to accept that her own agony had served no good purpose. It's easy to write her off as sadistic, but I’m inclined to think she was more deluded, wanting her own mutilation to make her a hero instead of just a victim who nearly became a mortality statistic.
This same kind of thinking shows up on a small scale with abusive parents who don't want to believe their own upbringing was abusive. And on a large scale, in the notion that we have to keep sending people to die in Iraq so that the earlier deaths won’t be "in vain." Somehow, letting more people die for a mistake gets sold as more noble than cutting our losses as best as we can.
In "Possessing the Secret of Joy," Tashi wants her mutilation to mean something, to symbolize defending her native culture against the invading Europeans. Instead she found herself oppressed in a more intimate and permanent way.
We want suffering to mean something, to not be in vain. But the only meaning to be found is when it motivates us to stop handing it down to the next generation. To find, as Mayahuel did, as Fauziya and Tashi both did, that resistance is the secret of joy.