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

Pete Sigal has written a fine book on a very difficult subject. He is well aware of the dangers of trying to write about the sexual imagination of distant peoples of past centuries. "By analyzing Nahua fertility rituals as they existed at the time of the conquest and discussing the changes in the structures of these rituals . . . I will show that neither the sexual taxonomies developed by colonial society nor those later promoted by modern Western peoples can capture the history of sexuality of the Nahuas" (p. 2). Yet ultimately, he eschews the prospect of consigning the Nahuas of early Mexico to ultimate unknowability—and hence oblivion. "Neither do I wish to suggest that Nahua notions of the sexual are so esoteric that we cannot ever understand them" (p. 3).

At its heart, the book is about what Sigal terms "the tlazolli complex." Tlazolli he defines not as "sin" (as did the Spaniards), but rather as "trash," for lack of a better word, explaining that it refers not just to garbage from a kitchen, but to the detritus of human existence on earth. It is part of the chaos that surrounds us, which we both fight to keep at bay and ultimately depend on. It is tears, soil, semen, blood, and much else. It is productive and destructive at the same time, fecund and hurtful, part of life, part of death—and it is at the heart of the Nahua sexual imagination.

Sigal insists on the use of a wide variety of sources, including those produced in Nahuatl, and beyond this, he insists that some of our sources be produced outside of the purview of the Spaniards. "If we read only the clerical documents, such as the reports of the priests and friars, sermons, and confessional manuals, or only notarial sources, such as criminal records and petitions—in whatever language—we would incorrectly believe that the sexual conquest [attempted by the Spaniards] succeeded" (p. 17). So it is that (except for the chapter explicitly addressing the Spanish concept of sin), he begins each thematically organized unit with a look at pre-conquest sources, or at least the very earliest possible post-conquest images or descriptions of ceremonies. Only then does he move on to colonial-era sources, largely produced under Spanish supervision of some stripe, reading them with an ability to hear echoes of and responses to an earlier time.

He repeatedly finds what Westerners might not expect to find, although believers in the tlazolli complex would. In textual images and in ritual, for example, key divinities are both male and female, both warrior and seducer, both violent and fertile. He makes strong efforts to avoid the pitfall that prior scholars of the subject have fallen into— that is, of finding what they want to find within the limited evidence. When he looks at homosexuality, for example, he quotes others who have argued that it was everywhere or it was nowhere, that it was frowned upon or condoned, depending on what they wanted or expected the truth to be. His cautious, thoughtful sifting of the evidence reveals "indigenous discourses that connected local homosexualities with a warrior motif fundamentally hostile to the 'passive' partner in male homosexual acts" (p. 178). They were not fundamentally hostile to homosexual sex per se; they critiqued certain angles in certain contexts. "Nahua culture in the early colonial years provided male and female homosexualities a place in the tlazolli complex that exceeded the Catholic notion of sodomitical sin" (p. 177). Only with the passing of many years did an alternate view of homosexuality as inherently and at all times evil come to pervade the Nahua imagination.

If I have a critique it is that the work seems sometimes too tentative. The author almost apologizes, for example, for his statement that "the Nahuas viewed the initiation of sex as a fundamentally feminine...