Female tricksters
Oct. 28th, 2015 10:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ikhet_sekhmetCouple of notes on these rara aves from The Encyclopedia of Religion.
"In her study of Zinacantecan myth from the Chiapas Highlands of Mexico, Eva Hunt [in The Transformation of the Hummingbird: Cultural Roots of a Zinacantecan Mythical Poem (Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY, 1977)] links contemporary female tricksters to the sixteenth-century goddess Cihuacoatl, a female deity with a tail, a fake baby, and a snake, which emerges from under her skirt and between her legs. In the contemporary Cuicatec region and the Puebla-Nahuatl area of Mexico, she is embodied as Matlacihuatl, and she is also known as Mujer Enredadora ("entangling woman"). Her name derives from maxtli, a loincloth. Matlacihuatl is adulterous and promiscuous, and she specializes in seducing homosexual men. She is sexually anomalous, having a vagina at the back of her neck that opens like a mouth. If a man does seduce her, he will become pregnant and give birth to a child that looks like excrement.
"A female turtle is the trickster of the Desána people in southern Columbia. She constantly outsmarts primordial monkeys, jaguars (the dominant supernatural beings of the primordial age), foxes, deer, and tapir, using their body parts to her advantage; for example, she uses the leg bone of the jaguar as a flute."
(At some point I will have to get my grubby little protruberances on Marilyn Jurich's Scheherazade's sisters: Trickster heroines and their stories in world literature.)
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Sullivan, Lawrence E. "Mesoamerican and South American Tricksters". in Eliade, Mircea (editor in chief). The Encyclopedia of Religion. New York, Macmillan, 1987. (p 51)
"In her study of Zinacantecan myth from the Chiapas Highlands of Mexico, Eva Hunt [in The Transformation of the Hummingbird: Cultural Roots of a Zinacantecan Mythical Poem (Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY, 1977)] links contemporary female tricksters to the sixteenth-century goddess Cihuacoatl, a female deity with a tail, a fake baby, and a snake, which emerges from under her skirt and between her legs. In the contemporary Cuicatec region and the Puebla-Nahuatl area of Mexico, she is embodied as Matlacihuatl, and she is also known as Mujer Enredadora ("entangling woman"). Her name derives from maxtli, a loincloth. Matlacihuatl is adulterous and promiscuous, and she specializes in seducing homosexual men. She is sexually anomalous, having a vagina at the back of her neck that opens like a mouth. If a man does seduce her, he will become pregnant and give birth to a child that looks like excrement.
"A female turtle is the trickster of the Desána people in southern Columbia. She constantly outsmarts primordial monkeys, jaguars (the dominant supernatural beings of the primordial age), foxes, deer, and tapir, using their body parts to her advantage; for example, she uses the leg bone of the jaguar as a flute."
(At some point I will have to get my grubby little protruberances on Marilyn Jurich's Scheherazade's sisters: Trickster heroines and their stories in world literature.)
__
Sullivan, Lawrence E. "Mesoamerican and South American Tricksters". in Eliade, Mircea (editor in chief). The Encyclopedia of Religion. New York, Macmillan, 1987. (p 51)
