Child Bearing
Although women were important in aspects other than those associated with the ability to bear children, the latter remained a very important part of their lives. The mythology and power associated with the ability to create was one which men tried to emulate. Men would participate in the act of bloodletting their own genitals to create something new from their blood. Instead of giving birth to life they would give birth to new eras through the symbolic gesture of menstruation. This act was highly ritualized; the objects used to pierce the skin were "stingray spines, obsidian blades, or other sharp instruments." The blood was allowed to drip on cloth, which was then burned.
Read more about this topic: Gender In Maya Society
Famous quotes containing the words child and/or bearing:
“But the mother’s yearning, that completest type of the life in another life which is the essence of real human love, feels the presence of the cherished child even in the debased, degraded man.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“It is almost impossible to be a doctor and an honest man, but it is obscenely impossible to be a psychiatrist without at the same time bearing the stamp of the most incontestable madness: that of being unable to resist that old atavistic reflex of the mass of humanity, which makes any man of science who is absorbed by this mass a kind of natural and inborn enemy of all genius.”
—Antonin Artaud (1896–1948)