Because the ‘proto-ethnographer’-friar Bernardino de Sahagún took the dangerous view that pre-Columbian Aztec practises should be copiously archived, so as to be more effectively Christianised, the visceral and poetic pregnancy and childbirth oration ‘O precious necklace, O quetzal feather’ survives. Lost for centuries, because Sahagún’s radical approach fell to the censor, the oration is a syncretistic mix of Nahua tradition and Christian judgement and correction. The orator is an authoritative female voice, shifting between an older kinswoman, speaking on behalf of all generations forever, a midwife (an ‘artisan and crafstwomen of birth’), and the goddesses Cihuacoatl and Yohualticitl.. Centre stage is the metamorphosis and ‘matrescence’ (Jones 2023) of the nascent mother, and a battle of birth on which the very world depends, as surely as it depends on the ongoing life of the sun. Should mother and baby fight through the profound existential crisis of birthdeath and live, the newborn mother will be celebrated as a heroic warrior returning with a little baby captive. Should she die, her death will be celebrated as a victory, her body suffused with sacral power, and she will become one of the Cihuateteo or Mocihuaquetzque: goddesses tasked with tending and ‘mothering’ the sun. ‘Oh strong and war-like woman, much-loved daughter! Brave woman, beautiful and tender as a dove. My lady, you have struggled and worked bravely. You have won!’.
The Aztec oration and images and statues of cihuateo and birthing mothers expose how far birth and motherhood have been masculinised, neutered, pacified, abstracted, co-opted and superseded (the first shall be last, natality shall be eclipsed by mortality [cf. Arendt, Janzen, Bliss]) in contemporary institutions and markets of ‘motherhood’ with their paradoxically high expectations and negations of the mother (cf. Rich), and in Christian traditions, which were already shhhing the raw power of the birth oration, as if singing it to sleep. Rites of passage mark transitions to adulthood/puberty, coupling, death, and the fact of having been born (but only after birth), rarely pushing back into the primal event of birth and the intense physical drama and risk of matrescence. Conservative advocates of ‘the family’ campaign and legislate to force women back into the ‘creatureliness’ of their own bodies (Project 2025), at the same time transcending the event of birth, while insisting on its centrality, and repressing the mother and divinising the child. A generalised ‘consecrated (religious or secular) representation of femininity is absorbed by motherhood’ and ‘nativity’ and ‘maternality’ (Kristeva, ‘Stabat Mater’), so far from lived experience that the concepts become sublime opposites which no woman can touch. Personal heroic and traumatic birth narratives have no echo chamber apart from (perhaps, if one has courage) circles of new mothers, with whom they are shared in private. Arguably the recent spiritualization and re-sacralisation of childbirth in high income countries has centred on a ‘neutered and vague’ ideal of ‘the natural’ (Jones 2023) and the battle for a woman’s power over her own birth experience— fight enough, important enough, but a long way from the risky and visceral existential battle that sustains the world and the very life of the sun.
Drawing on a wealth of interdisciplinary wisdom (analyses of Aztec cosmology and childbirth orations by Camilla Townsend, Thelma Stone and Anne Key, on ‘indecent’ and creative theologies from Marcella Althaus Reid and Catherine Keller as well as groundbreaking studies of natality and matrescence), I explore the tensions between the pre-Columbian oration and the editorial voice of Christian judgement and correction, to expose the sheer queerness of a Judeo-Christian imaginary of primary male c-sections; a male God who appropriates the screams, pants and gasps of the birthing woman; the colonial translation of the battling mother hero into the virgin who has sex with a cloud and conceives through the ear (cf. Althaus-Reid); and the anxious sacrificial and ceremonial assertions that men ‘make men’ (cf. Mead). I then ask what life and power birth could give to cultural and religious imaginaries, if natality were not discarded as incidental, or marginal—or feminist which is another way of saying the same thing. In birth lies the profound experience of the dissolution of the boundaries between human, animal and divine; the power of the waters and the watershed (cf. Keller, Face of the Deep); the mystery of the body being taken over in the ‘passion’ of birth (the experience of being active and passive, the hyperagent who is at the same time overcome [cf. Sherwood, ‘Passion-Binding-Passion’]); and the most aching, fundamental prayer that all will be saved/safe in the drama of nascent life at the edges of death.
This paper draw on the poetic and visceral power of an Aztec childbirth oration, displaced in a drama of the birth of Christianity, in order to counter masculinised, neutered, pacified, abstracted, co-opted and superseded dramas of 'birth'. The orator is an authoritative female voice, shifting between an older kinswoman, speaking on behalf of all generations forever, a midwife (an ‘artisan and crafstwomen of birth’), and the goddesses Cihuacoatl and Yohualticitl. Centre stage is the metamorphosis and ‘matrescence’ (Jones 2023) of the nascent mother, and a battle of birth on which the very world depends, as surely as it depends on the ongoing life of the sun. I use the energy of the oration to expose the queer displacements of birth in the Judeo-Christian tradition and 'secular' institutions of motherhood, and ask what our cultural imaginaries might look like if natality were not discarded as incidental--or feminist.