Eduardo Galeano - Mirrors - Stories of Almost Everyone

Under the ninth moon, Gútapa gave birth. From his knee were born the first Tikunas, welcomed with great huzzahs by the blue-winged, red-lored, and grape-eating parrots, and other commentators.

The moon lost her first battle against the sun when he spread word that it wasn’t the wind who was impregnating women.

Then history brought more sad news:

the division of labor assigned nearly all tasks to the females so that

we males could dedicate ourselves to mutual extermination,

the right to property and the right to inheritance allowed women

to be owners of nothing,

the organization of the family enclosed them in the cage of father,

husband, and son,

and along came the state, which was like the family, only bigger.

The moon shared in her daughters’ downfall.

Left far behind were the times when the Egyptian moon would devour the sun at dusk and sire him at dawn,

when the Irish moon kept the sun in line by threatening him with perpetual night,

and when the kings of Greece and Crete would dress up as queens with taffeta tits, and in sacred ceremonies unfurl the moon as their standard.

In the Yucatan, moon and sun lived in matrimony. When they fought, it caused an eclipse. The moon was lady of the seas and the springs, and goddess of the earth. With the passing of time, she lost her powers. Now she only reigns over births and illnesses.

On the coasts of Peru, we can date her humiliation. Shortly before the Spanish invasion, in the year 1463, the moon of the Chimú kingdom, the most powerful of moons, surrendered to the army of the Incan sun.

Tlazoltéotl, Mexico’s moon, goddess of the Huasteca night, managed to elbow her way into the macho pantheon of the Aztecs.

She was the most mothering of mothers, who protected women in labor and their midwives, and guided seeds on their voyage to becoming plants. Goddess of love and also of garbage, condemned to eat shit, she embodied fertility and lust.

Like Eve, like Pandora, Tlazoltéotl bore the guilt for men’s perdition. Women born in her times lived condemned to seek pleasure.

And when the earth trembled, in soft vibrations or devastating earthquakes, no one doubted: “It is she.”

Herodotus the Greek proved that the river and the sky of Egypt were unlike any other river or any other sky, and the same was true of its customs. Funny people, the Egyptians: they kneaded dough with their feet, and clay with their hands, and they mummified their dead cats and kept them in sacred chests.

But most remarkable was the place women held among men. Whether nobles or plebeians, they married freely without surrendering their names or their possessions. Education, property, work, and inheritance were theirs by right, not only for men, and women were the ones who shopped in the market while men stayed home weaving. According to Herodotus, who was not entirely trustworthy, women peed standing up and men on their knees.

According to the Old Testament, the daughters of Eve were to suffer divine punishment forever.

Stoning could be the fate of adulteresses and witches and brides who were not virgins,

to the stake marched the daughters of priests who became prostitutes,

and off with the hand of any woman who grabbed a man by the balls, even in self-defense or in defense of her husband.

For forty days a woman giving birth to a son remained impure. Eighty days of filth if the child was a girl. Impure was the menstruating woman for seven days and nights, and her impurity infected all who touched her or touched the chair on which she sat or the bed in which she slept.

Mitra, mother of the sun and the water and of all sources of life, was a goddess from birth. When she arrived in India from Babylonia or Persia, the goddess had to become a god.

A number of years have passed since Mitra’s arrival, and women are still not very welcome in India. There are fewer women than men, in some regions eight for every ten. Many are those who never arrive because they die in their mothers’ wombs, and countless more are smothered at birth.

Prevention is the best medicine, since women can be very dangerous. As a sacred text of the Hindu tradition warns: “A lascivious woman is poison, serpent, and death, all in one.”

Others are virtuous, though proper habits are being lost. Tradition orders widows to throw themselves into the fire where the dead husband’s body burns, but today few if any are willing to obey that command.

For centuries or millennia they were willing, and they were many. In contrast, there is no instance ever in the whole history of India of a husband leaping into the pyre of his deceased wife.

About a thousand years ago, Chinese goddesses stopped being goddesses.

Male power, which by then had taken over the earth, was also aligning the heavens. The goddess Xi He was split in two and the goddess Nu Gua was relegated to the status of mere woman.

Xi He had been mother of the suns and the moons. She gave comfort and succor to her sons and daughters at the end of their exhausting voyages through day and night. When she was divided into Xi and He, each of them a he-god, she was no longer a she and she disappeared.

Nu Gua did not disappear but she was reduced to a mortal.

In other times she had been the founder of all that lives:

she had cut off the legs of the great cosmic tortoise to give the world and the sky columns to rest on,

she had saved the world from disasters of fire and water,

she had invented love, lying with her brother behind a tall screen of grasses,

and she had created nobles and plebeians by modeling the higher ones of yellow clay and the lower ones of mud from the river.

Cicero explained that women ought to be ruled by male guardians “due to the weakness of their intellect.”

Roman women went from one pair of male hands to another. The father who married off his daughter could cede her to her husband as property or tender her to him as a loan. In either case, what counted was the dowry, the patrimony, the inheritance. For pleasure there were slave women.

Like Aristotle, Roman physicians believed that women, all of them, patricians, plebeians, or slaves, had fewer teeth and smaller brains than men, and that on the days they menstruated, their mirrors darkened with a reddish tinge.

Pliny the Elder, the empire’s greatest scientific authority, demonstrated that a menstruating woman soured new wine, sterilized crops, caused seeds and fruits to wither, killed grafted plants and swarms of bees, tarnished bronze, and made dogs go crazy.

A headache may give birth to a goddess. Athena sprouted from the throbbing head of her father, Zeus, whose temples split open to deliver her. She was born without a mother.