A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [174]
We know virtually nothing about the Huastec mother goddess, but we do know that for the conquering Aztecs she was the same being as their own goddess Tlazolteotl. You might imagine that all mother goddesses have a pretty straightforward job description – ensuring fertility and seeing everybody safely into adulthood – but, as the cultural historian Marina Warner points out, it is often much more complicated:
It’s important to see that all mother goddesses are not the same. A lot of times the mother goddesses are related to the spring, to vegetation, to that kind of fertility – not just human, animal fertility. Then in terms of fertility you enter the area of extreme danger, because of the great threat of death to either mothers or children in childbirth. That’s been a constant in human history until fairly recently. There is also a very strong sense that this contact with the danger of perpetuating life will actually brush you very close to pollution. In Christianity that’s very strong. Augustine said, ‘We are born between faeces and urine,’ and he was very worried about the animal aspect of human parturition. Mother goddesses on the whole have to help human beings confront this anxiety – there’s a danger of pollution, that death and birth can be mixed up together.
Childbirth and infancy are always messy affairs. To achieve even a minimum level of hygiene means devising systems for coping with filth – and mother goddesses have to deal with filth on a cosmic scale.
So it isn’t at all surprising that the name Tlazolteotl literally means, in the Aztec language, ‘filth goddess’. She was a figure of fertility, vegetation and renewal, the ultimate green goddess, transforming organic waste and excrement into healthy new life, guaranteeing the great cycle of natural regeneration. This is a goddess who gets her hands dirty, and, according to Aztec myth, not just her hands: another of her names is ‘eater of filth’ – she consumes dirt and purifies it. So, if we can read our goddess in the same light as the Aztecs, this is, perhaps disconcertingly, why her mouth is open and her eyes are rolling upwards.
Just as Tlazolteotl was held to consume actual filth and thus restore life and goodness, so she did the same in moral terms. She was, the Aztecs told the Spaniards, the goddess who received confessions of sexual sin:
One recited before her all vanities; one spread before her all unclean works, however ugly, however grave … Indeed all was exposed, told before her.
To the Spanish friar Bernardino de Sahagún, this seemed an uncanny parallel to Christian views on sexual sin and confession. We have to wonder how far the Spaniards are seeing the Aztec, and through them the Huastec, goddesses in terms of their own traditions, especially of Mary. But the Christian tradition had removed Mary from any connection with sex, and the Spanish were disturbed by Tlazolteotl’s inherent engagement with what they saw as filth. Sahagún deplores the fact that she is also ‘mistress of lust and debauchery’, and the Aztecs in their turn despised their Huastec subjects as hopelessly licentious.
It is hard to come to any view about our statue’s meaning, and some scholars even question whether she is a goddess at all. What more can the evidence of the statue tell us?
Her most striking feature is a huge, fan-shaped headdress, about ten times the size of her head. Although part of it is broken off, you can see that, like the rest of her, it is conceived as an assemblage of geometric shapes. In the middle, resting directly on her head, is a plain oblong slab; sitting on that, an unadorned cone. Both are framed in a great semicircle of what look like stone ostrich feathers. They may be feathers or perhaps barkwood, but the original paint that would have told us has long gone. A headdress like this must