From Moon Goddesses to Virgins: The Colonization of Yucatecan Maya Sexual Desire (review)

For anyone who has studied an indigenous language, From Moon Goddesses to Virgins deserves a great deal of respect. Using Mayan-language documents primarily from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Sigal explores the issue of sexual desire, seeing in this theme not only personal and religious relations but also "sexualized debates about political, social, cultural, and economic issues" (p. xiv). Sigal uses, but does not necessarily support, the arguments of Foucault and Lacan—the work of the latter perhaps needing a bit more explanation for the reader.

The discussion of sexual desire illuminates and adds complexity to older themes such as duality, class domination, penetration, blood, the subjugation of conquered peoples, and gender relations. At the same time, Sigal's discussion of the multiple forms (including genders and roles) of the Moon Goddess and of concepts such as the "transsexual penis" or the "tarantula vagina" makes it clear that he is working with concepts alien to most modern thought. Western sexual categories have little use in this Mayan vision of the world. Sigal emphasizes this point in his discussion of the floating phallus, noting that the concept is "something almost incomprehensible to a Western imagination. For the Maya, sexual desire and fantasy went beyond the field delineated by Freud and the sexologists. Sexual behavior did not exist as a discernible category of sexuality but rather as an element of ritual" (p. 249).

Central to the book is the transformation of the Moon Goddess into the Virgin Mary, the outcome of Spanish Christianization and Mayan reinscription. Sigal argues, "[C]olonized people metaphorically reinscribed their own traditional concepts, placing those concepts within a package designed by the colonizers. In this case the package was the Virgin Mary; the reinscribed concepts were part of the Moon Goddess" (p. 120). Such hybridization is a core theme of the book. Sigal states that the Maya ethical system "changed into a hybridized form, one in which the two systems (Maya and Spanish) mixed to create something which did not replicate either of the prior two" (p. xiv). For a work that generally respects the conventions of specialized vocabularies, it is unclear why Sigal uses "hybrid" instead of the more common "syncretic," especially since there does not seem to be any difference in definition.

Sigal relies on texts produced by elite men, which had at their core a highly ritualized understanding of the world based on what we might call sexuality or gender identity. These same texts, however, are used to justify elite dominance and lower-class submission. Sigal clearly recognizes the problems inherent in trying to understand what these texts meant to the elite, let alone to commoners or to the modern reader, and qualifies much of his analysis with the terms "perhaps" or "may." Even so, one must take certain leaps of faith, grounded in the author's expertise, to make sense of the material and follow the discussion. Another difficulty Sigal faced is brought out in his discussion of penis-piercing rituals: "As postconquest representations of preconquest rituals, [the texts] contained information primarily about what postconquest . . . Maya shamans thought. But they were particularly partial thoughts, as I do not know if the shamans continued to practice these rituals or if they simply knew of them from oral histories or preconquest texts" (pp. 161-62).

Using his linguistic skills, his intellectual perceptions, and his historical imagination, Sigal has made a commendable effort to understand these complex and difficult texts in order to probe the mind of the Mayan colonial elite male. The dense textual analysis and the jargon this entails make the book rather tough going. Its primary audience will most likely be Mayan specialists, as well as those dealing with related themes of religion, sex (broadly construed), and textual analysis. Human beings, even...