Flesh Made Wet: Seeded Bodies and Gendered Making in Nahua Religion

During the Mexica Empire (c. 1325 – 1521), religious leaders made sacred artworks for state ceremonies. In sixteenth-century drawings and texts, like those by Bernadino de Sahagún and Nahua authors, the spaces and materials that female religious leaders created, animated, and used come to the fore, as well as the skilled knowledge they needed to realize their roles. This presentation examines this gendered making and expertise in Nahua religion, first focusing on its expanse in how religious women danced, braided garlands, and poured libations in the open-air spaces of the capital precinct of Tenochtitlan. It then barrels in to study their role in preparing and constructing sacred bodies and bones made from seeds.

In the making of this seeded sculpture, female religious leaders carried a deft knowledge of plants and their mutability. They chose specific seeds, ground them into flour on a metate, mixed them with maguey syrup and toasted maize, and sculpted them into bodies. Through this gendered making, women demonstrated a rich knowledge: they had a discerning eye for seed quality, mastered ratios of sap to flour, and stabilized sculptures with cooked grains. Importantly, they also incorporated sacred heat to animate the sculpted body, both through fire and with their hands. I argue that by forming the body with seed, heat, and liquid, female religious leaders warmed sculptural flesh and made it wet, in the same way that the sacred female figure Cihuacoatl made the bones and bodies of human beings in Nahua philosophy.