Elevation of women

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Blood and sex were paramount for pre-Columbian Mexican and Peruvian women, as the National Museum of Women in the Arts' "Divine and Human: Women in Ancient Mexico and Peru" exhibit superbly shows. Sex, essential for producing new life, and blood, indispensable for human sacrifices, were crucial for pleasing gods who insistently called for more humans to please them and serve as sacrificial victims. In this spiritual cosmos, women as divinely appointed procreators were elevated beyond bearing and nurturing children to higher roles as goddesses and priestesses as well. This world of opposites pervaded Mexico's Aztec (circa A.D. 1350-1521) and Mayan societies (circa 600 B.C.-A.D. 1000), and Peru's Moche (circa A.D. 1-700) and Chimu Empire (A.D. 900-1470).

Yet little precise information existed about women's roles until the 1991 excavations at northern Peru's San Jose de Moro in Jequetepeque Valley uncovered the tombs of two Late Moche-period priestesses, according to the wall text. The tombs clearly indicated San Jose's importance as both a cemetery and a ceremonial center for more than 1,000 years and the priestesses' central role there.

In the haunting, dimly lit final exhibit gallery, curators from the Ministry of Education in Peru and the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia in Mexico partially reconstructed the tomb of a plume-headdressed priestess. Clearly associated with blood sacrificial ceremonies -- as the exhibit label tells us -- she's arranged into what was called "the birth position" with a copper masklike face and arms and legs arranged openly.

Moreover, discovery of still another priestess's tomb the next year indicates that these female priests came from a powerful family of women who energetically ruled alongside men in San Jose de Moro.

Mexico also had its share of early women's tombs, with the richly filled graves in the state of Veracruz packed with splendid terra-cotta "Cihuateteo" figures. The Cihuateteo, according to the museum, guided the dead to the afterworld.

The curators wisely organized the 365-object show into eight sections:

• Society, Politics and Religion.

• Body Adornment.

• Sacred Origins of Food.

• Textiles and Clothing.