This podcast was an exercise in futility, because we really don’t know anything about this object. It was created in central Mexico by the Huastecs, a people who were then wiped out by the Aztecs. Who were then wiped out by the Spanish. And since neither the Huastecs nor the Aztecs left us much to go on, we’re playing a pointless game of telephone, trying to figure out what some writer’s enemies’ enemies were on about when they made this odd statue. MacGregor brings in this expert on the culture and then disagrees with her about whether or not this is a statue of a goddess or a high-status woman, princess or priestess.
You get the sense, listening to the podcast, that he’d like his theory validated, that it’s a mother goddess known not just for motherhood, or fertility of the earth in the spring, but for devouring excrement. Apparently there was such a goddess among the Aztecs, and you basically went to her to confess your sexual indiscretions; symbolically she somehow ate everyone’s shit. Although, since that explanation comes from Spanish writers, it may be that they were projecting behavior, metaphoric or otherwise, from a Catholic confessional. It’s true that mother goddesses have often had this devouring, terrifying aspect, throughout history; but I don’t know much about how myth typically deals with the processing of waste. Someone recently staged a Tannhäuser at Bayreuth that was all about a green way of sustainably processing human excrement into something that would promote fertility and growth; I suppose this director had read all about this Huastec goddess. I’ll confess to being over my head here.
I was over my head in the museum, where at first I photographed another Huastec goddess sculpture that was standing nearby—not the one MacGregor was talking about. But I kind of like my 2nd Huastec sculpture, so here she is:
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