69
Stone statue, from Mexico
AD 900–1521
There is an old adage that an act of translation is always an act of betrayal. When we want to translate complex ideas from a lost culture with no written language, the situation is no better: we usually need to work our way through layers of later interpretation by people with quite different ways of thinking, and with no words designed to express alien thoughts.
To get anywhere near an original understanding of this object, we have to go through a filter of two later cultures with two different languages, and even then we’re not quite sure where we stand. It is an object that has always intrigued me, and I am less and less sure that I understand it. It is the statue of a woman, from what is now northern Mexico, but which around 1400 was the land of the Huastec people.
The story of the Aztecs and how the great Aztec Empire was conquered by the Spaniards in the 1520s is widely known. We hear much less, though, about the people that the Aztecs themselves had conquered to build their empire. One of the most interesting peoples subjugated by the Aztecs were their northern neighbours, the Huastecs. We know that the Huastecs lived on Mexico’s northern Gulf coast, in the area around modern Veracruz, and that between the tenth and fifteenth centuries they had a flourishing city culture. But around 1400 this prosperous world was overwhelmed by the aggressive Aztec state to the south, and the Huastec ruling class was effectively liquidated. There is very little now that would enable us to reconstruct the world and the ideas of the Huastecs: there is no trace of any Huastec writing, and the only written evidence we have are Aztec accounts of the people they conquered, as transmitted through the Spanish after they in turn had defeated the Aztecs. So if we want the Huastec to speak to us directly, we have to go to the objects they left behind. These are their only documents, and among the most eloquent of them are groups of highly distinctive stone statues.
This statue of a Huastec woman in the Mexico gallery at the British Museum presides over a group of companions – three sandstone sisters, all carved to the same design. Our statue is about 1.5 metres (5 feet) high, so more or less life-size, but she’s not at all lifelike. She looks as though she’s been shaped by a giant pastry cutter – the contours of the body are straight lines, the surface is flat – you might almost imagine she is a huge gingerbread woman. When you step to the side, you can see that she is carved out of a very thin piece of sandstone. Edge-on, she is less than 10 centimetres (4 inches) thick. She folds her hands over her stomach and her arms are held out from her sides, making two triangular spaces. In fact, she is really just a series of geometric shapes. Her breasts are perfect hemispheres, and below the waist she wears a rectangular skirt that falls flat and undecorated to the plinth. This is a lady of straight lines and hard edges, clearly not somebody you would choose to mess with. But she does have two humanizing aspects: her small head is unexpectedly animated – she seems to be looking up and to the side towards something – and her lips are open, as though she may even be speaking. And below her breasts are the only surface details on the entire body – curved lines of sagging stone flesh, signs certainly of maturity, possibly of maternity, which lead many people to believe that she may be a mother goddess.
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 have been a totally unambiguous statement of who this figure was. Maddeningly, it is a statement that we cannot now read with any confidence.
The Huastec expert Kim Richter gives us her more secular understanding of the statue:
I’ve argued that the sculptures represent the Huastec elite, who dressed up with these fancy costume elements that were actually common within the international elite of Meso-America. I’ve linked the Huastec headdresses to similar types of headdresses found in other regions.
I think it’s the fashion of the day but also so much more … it’s not unlike, for example, a Gucci bag today. You see it in wealthy people all over the world – it’s a symbol of status and it symbolizes the connections between these different regions of the globe today, and these headdresses had a very similar function. They showed to their own people that they were part of this larger Meso-American culture.
Kim Richter may be right, and these statues may simply be representations of the local elite, but I find it hard to believe that these geometric naked female statues are aristocratic family likenesses, even of the most ritualized sort. We know that groups of them stood high up above their communities, on artificial mounds where people could congregate for ceremonies and processions, but it is hard to be certain about anything in the face of our statue. And, sadly, there is nobody now who can tell us. Kim Richter says:
I don’t think the sculptures really have much meaning to local people there today. So when I was in the field and I spoke to indigenous people, they were interested and curious, and they wanted to learn more, but they didn’t know anything about these sculptures. I heard a report that in one of the sites the farmers would shoot at sculptures and use them as target practice.
This object reveals more about what we don’t know than what we do. Our statue’s physical presence speaks to us with peremptory directness, but of all the objects in our history, she is perhaps the hardest to read confidently through the filters of the historical record. With the next object, I will also try to reconstruct a lost spiritual world, but there is much more evidence to go on. It involves investigating one of the last places on earth to be settled by human beings – Easter Island – with some of the most instantly recognizable sculptures in the world.