Masculinity and
Power
in the Ancient Mesoamerican Ballgame
by:
A. Taplin
© A. Taplin, 2003,
All
Rights Reserved
“Sport…is a
perpetual creation of the men who
practice and
organize it, and who are,
in turn,
transformed by their very creation.”
--Georges
Magnane
Sports and manhood are
linked irrevocably in the minds of contemporary American men. Our preoccupation with football, baseball,
basketball, and a variety of other more or less violent sports has
become so
pervasive that we expect athletic success to carry over into all other
realms
of a man’s life. Modern American
culture seems to deify professional athletes, and when given the
opportunity to
study this phenomenon in detail, I began to wonder where it had come
from and
what deeper messages lay behind it. I
wanted to know if this same man/athlete identification would work in a
situation as removed from my own experience as that of the ancient Maya. What I found, in the end, wasn’t
surprising. They associated maleness
with athleticism in the same way that many other cultures do. Maleness often means dominance, conquest,
and even the total destruction of rivals. The culture-specific means by
which
this association was maintained in ancient Mesoamerica lay in the
ballgame. It was a game full of myth
and symbolism, but one that nonetheless made the public demonstration
of
violence a necessary part of masculinity.
The ballgame lay at the
center of Mayan culture. It was
commonly played in teams, and the hierarchy of the team probably
mimicked the
hierarchy of real life (Schele 1993: 368).
The king always played a special role.
He was the focus of the game while the rest of the royal family
supported him. Sites all across ancient
Mesoamerica are rich with ballgame images and carvings.
Social elites loved playing ball and loved
remembering their victories, and as we will see, used those memories in
a
variety of important metaphorical ways.
The rules of the game were
simple. The players, who were usually a
group of nobles competing against their war captives, had to bounce a
rubber
ball off angled benches on either side of the playing alley. They could not allow the ball to touch the
ground, and scored points by hitting special markers at mid-court. They hit the ball with their hips and sides,
or sometimes with a special piece of equipment called a yoke. The ball was slightly larger and heavier
than a basketball (Schele 1993: 341).
Equipment for the game was
cumbersome, but it protected players from the impact of the ball. They wore cotton padding around their
pelvises to support the weight of the yoke.
Their forearms were also protected with thick cotton padding. Only one knee was protected with a
kneepad. They wore calf-length leather
skirts over their loincloths that probably prevented scrapes. Headdresses and other symbols were worn on
the body as well (Schele 1993: 343).
The ball court was a
metaphorical space rich with meaning.
Architects almost always situated ball courts between public
ritual
areas and elite residences, because the “ball court and ball game
played a role
in mediating between the mundane and the supernatural (Joyce 1991:
123).” The simple athletic competition of
the game
also went hand in hand with meanings related to religion, ideology, and
politics. When the ancient Mayans
played the ballgame they “assumed the roles of cosmic beings, elevating
their
play to the level of a great cosmic drama (Schele 1993: 343).” In this way they brought ancestors and
living descendants together in the same physical space.
On a religious level the
ball game re-enacted the myth of the
Hero Twins. In this story a pair of
twins avenge the death of their father, named the First Father or Maize
God,
through trickery and quick thinking.
The Lords of Death (who symbolize death, disease, and fear)
repeatedly
challenge them to play the ball game.
Every day the competition ends in a tie. Tragically
the Twins won’t be allowed to leave the Otherworld
until a victor has been decided, so after each tie they’re forced to
endure
another torturous night as guests of the evil Lords.
Finally they defeat the Lords through a trick involving the
substitution of the ball for a rabbit.
Enraged, the Lords concede defeat, and later die at the hands of
the
Twins.
The ball game has complex
metaphorical meanings. In one sense it
was symbolic of defying death’s finality (Schele 1993: 350). The Hero Twins had outwitted the cosmic
forces arrayed against them, and the ballplayers would be expected to
do the
same in real life political situations.
By winning the game they demonstrated their ability to overcome
difficult odds. General themes
involving team competition, roles of specific players, winning and
losing bets,
and the consequences of defeat all played into a general metaphorical
framework
for ballgame meaning (Schele 1993: 348).
In the end the game stood for life itself and the quest to gain
power,
and that is the essence of the metaphor.
Ancient Mesoamericans
believed that their ball courts “opened into the Otherworld (Schele
1993:
350).” Every court was the first step
on a road in the sky that we would recognize as the Milky Way. That road led to the Otherworld.
Each court was a portal through which
players had access to a special primeval time and space, the space of
creation. Some scholars have even likened
images on
the sides of ball courts to glass-bottom boats or windows (Miller 1998). There is a sense of cosmic reality just
barely contained or just beneath the surface of these architectural
constructions. In that way the ball
players were situated within a special magical space where they were
themselves
and not themselves simultaneously. They
were themselves in a kingly capacity, but they were also not themselves
because
they temporarily embodied the Hero Twins.
In the realm of the
Otherworld lived an assortment of important mythical figures. Most important was the First Father, whom
the Twins avenged by defeating the Lords of Death (Chase 1992: 107). The First Father represented fertility and
productivity to the ancient Mesoamericans.
In order to understand how, we must return briefly to the story
of his
defeat in the Underworld. He too had
played the ball game against the Lords of Death, but they tricked him
and he
lost. After his death he was
decapitated, and his head was hung in a tree.
A beautiful woman walked by, and from his tree he spit in her
hand. This resulted in her impregnation
and the
subsequent birth of the Twins. When
they defeated the Lords of Death, the Twins tried to bring him back to
life. For some reason he was unable to
name all of his own body parts and the Twins were unsuccessful. Instead they left him in the ball court to
watch over the rest of his descendants (Schele 1993: 345).
The First Father plays an
important part in the function of the ball court, which mediates
mundane
reality and the much more important Otherworldy reality.
There is something very important going on
here, a psychological process that is uniquely masculine, because it is
unique
to the role of the father. According to
Warren Steinberg, a disciple of psychologist Carl Jung,
the father, as the natural “other,” belongs
to the
new and exciting nonmother world. He
helps the child to differentiate from the mother by representing the
world that
the child is entering when the child, as part of a normal developmental
sequence, separates from the merged relationship with the mother. If the father is receptive and supportive as
the child moves away from the mother, the world will seem like a safer
place. The father offers the child a
stable place in which to practice independence and separateness. The
very concept of reality is represented by the father, that is, reality
experienced as an external force (Steinberg 1993: 67, emphasis
added).
In other words, our fathers are charged with introducing us to a new, in this case metaphorical, reality. The Mayan nobles recognized how important Fathers were to mediating this Otherworldly system of symbols and codes. A couple of obvious things show the exact magnitude of this connection. For example, First Father was supposedly buried in every ball court floor and his face was part of the hieroglyph for ball playing (Schele 1993). There is even one painting of Bird-Jaguar, a famous king, playing ball with his father and grandfather as supporting players (Schele 1993: 360). Fathers were the sources of power, since kingship was passed down through patrilines, and elite men understood how Otherworld symbols pertained to power and masculinity. They were members of a socioeconomic and political elite that used the ballgame as a method for transmitting important symbolic information. The First Father’s presence in the floor of every ball court confirmed the role of the father as mediator to a symbolic reality.
To
the majority of people, masculinity is equated with self-worth, power,
victory,
and competence (Steinberg 1993: 138). A
good man has the Midas touch; everything he does meets with success. Or at least that’s what he thinks. This pattern repeats itself in culture after
culture, and we can safely assume that the ancient Mesoamerican
cultures were
no exception. The images that have been
preserved from them are not surprising by our current standards for
masculinity. Men are shown engaged in
warfare, capturing prisoners, hunting, engaged in ritual dance, and
receiving
visitors in a leadership capacity (Joyce 2000: 70).
Ancient Mesoamerica’s basic framework for manhood would probably
seem familiar to us, although very little direct archaeological
research has
been published to verify that fact directly.
We can only assume from surviving images that it must be true. For the purposes of analysis, then, this
paper will rely principally on current masculinity research for
understanding
antiquity. We can only assume that the
analogy holds.
It
has been said that “the accumulation of power is one of the defining
characteristics of the masculine persona” (Steinberg 1993: 136). Scholars often define power as a capacity to
change other people’s behavior, and from Mark Antony to JFK that
principle has
been demonstrated time and time again.
Each of these figures commanded the attention and obedience (not
necessarily unwilling) of thousands of others.
They have been remembered in history as true men, and members of
a
selective pantheon to which normal men seldom gain access.
Part of their mystique, as well, lies in
their sexual prowess, because their reproductive power and sexual
exploits
mirror the power they command in social and political spheres. Cleopatra and Marilyn Monroe were certainly
important trophies for powerful men.
Powerful men get what they want.
Mayan kings were very much
interested in symbolic demonstrations of power. They
regularly commissioned stelae to record their conquests and
kingdoms. These stelae would record
feats of conquest, and took huge amounts of stone and talent to create. They were probably expensive.
A lot of Mayan imagery-- on stelae for
example-- shows nobility who are identifiable by their serenity,
attire, size
and placement in the scene, and by the artifacts that they carry (Chase
1992:
228). Since kingdom conquest was a regular feature of Mayan political
life,
military leadership was an important part of being in command. There were plenty of opportunities to
demonstrate military aptitude. Rulers
wanted to be remembered as powerful and confident leaders, because
probably
they would have had well established track records.
They were men in the public eye.
One of the most politically
direct and temporally immediate goals of the ballgame was defense of
one’s
honor in a public setting. Players
fought for respect. This same situation
was replicated in 18th century Europe in the form of sword duels. R.W. Connell says that
…at the intersection between [a] direct
involvement
in violence and the ethic of family honor was the institution of the
duel. Willingness to face an opponent in
the
potentially lethal one-to-one combat was a key test of gentry
masculinity
(Connell 1995: 190).
Although time and space obviously separate
this
example from the Mesoamerican ballgame, there are still some valuable
analogous
connections here. The Mesoamericans
were as interested in family as the European aristocracy.
That has certainly been demonstrated by the
First Father’s role in the ballgame.
More importantly, though, their honor as men was at stake too. They were public figures who would have had
an image to maintain. They had to be
powerful and in control, because anything less than that would call
their
leadership into question. They needed to
periodically defend and display their honor.
In
other words, men had a public self that they maintained through playing
ball. They were required to do so by
the expectations of history and the public.
Jeff Hearn helps shed some light on this subject when he says
that
To see public men as selves is to refer to
two,
usually distinct, phenomena: the general
category of the ‘public self’ of men in the public domain; and the particular ‘public selves’ of particular
men. The former refers to the
production of some generalized notion of typical, characteristic,
preferred, or
ideal public selves of men in the public domains, without any necessary
reference
to particular individuals… [on the other hand] particular ‘public
selves’ refer
to the public selves of particular men (Hearn 1992: 210, original
emphasis).
On the one hand men in the public eye are
expected
to act in a specific way. They must fit
certain (for lack of a better word) stereotypes of the archetypal male. In Mesoamerican society public men were
expected to win wars and then play the ballgame against their captives. On the other hand, public men are each
unique, with unique achievements.
So perhaps the ballgame had
a twofold purpose. First it was a way
by which men could adhere to ancient Mesoamerican ideas about powerful
men. They assured the public of their
leadership capabilities. As we already
know, men as leaders are considered powerful, successful, and
victorious. The ballgame was a way to
prove those
aspects of masculinity and then apply them to the general
category of “public self.”
Ideal kings won wars, took a lot of captives, and then ritually
sacrificed those captives. They
successfully carried out wars and won them.
In short, they were honorable.
Ballgames
were a useful way to show the particular
public selves of men as well. Each ball
competition arose out of a specific and immediate conquest, wherein a
king used
his own particular military talents to expand his kingdom and subdue
his
time-specific enemies. The captives he
sacrificed were available because of his own specific achievement. He had his own style of playing the game and
his own style of leadership. In many
ways he was probably unlike the kings who had come before him.
Two meanings were
superimposed on an individual ballgame, then.
On the first and more metaphorical level, leaders joined the
ranks of
the Hero Twins, the ideal men. The Hero
Twins and every other male king were expected to play and
win the game, so by participating in this metaphorical
framework men confirmed their masculinity and maintained their general
public
self, since every elite man before them had done the same.
On a deeper level, the ball games were
celebrations of specific achievement, which would contribute to a man’s
particular public self as well. He
confirmed his entitlement to the throne within a very specific
historical
context.
Mayan males lived in a
patriarchal culture, and that’s part of the reason they were so
interested in
self-aggrandizement and the defense of honor.
They were in competition with one another. According
to Michael Messner, patriarchy includes intermale
dominance. A minority of men must
dominate the masses of men (Messner 1994: 86).
Not only did the elites dominate the common men, but within the
elites
there was competition as well. They
wanted to adhere as closely as possible to the general public’s idea of
masculinity. In essence, they fought to
be more manly than the next guy.
It
makes sense that competition would arise in an arena as purely physical
as the
ballgame. Males are accustomed to
thinking of their bodies as weapons (Messner 1994: 90).
According to many studies, aggression is a
natural part of the male sex (Konner 2002: 95). The
competition that’s most useful in proving manhood is
competition that happens on terms that are inherently male.
In
masculine sports, the body is a weapon for domination, which makes it
both a
medium of and target for violence (McKay 2000: 89).
Obviously players needed equipment for protection from physical
damage. Any harm caused a king was
probably seen as damage done by his opponent.
He had to make frequent dives for the ball, which could easily
result in
scrapes and broken skin. There is
something inherently masculine about that.
As Messner says, “to endure pain is courageous, to survive pain
is manly
(Messner 1994: 86). We talk about
“maschismo” often. Macho people take
things to extremes; they think of gender as a continuum with extreme
forms of
masculinity and femininity on either end (McKay 2000: 91).
The ballgame would seem appealing to those
interested in expressing their masculinity in a macho way.
They would want to engage in “ultra-”
or “hyper-” masculine activities. The end
result of a losing game, after all,
was usually death.
Every
important ball competition ended in the loss of a human life. When the First Father lost his competition
to the Lords of Death he was promptly decapitated.
Ancient Mesoamericans maintained the metaphor by decapitating
their losers as well. Scenes of ritual
decapitation
are abundant in Mesoamerican art.
Chichen Itza, Aparicio, El Tajín, and many others show captives
who have
just been decapitated. Some sites even
included skull racks, where the skulls of recently decapitated
prisoners were
stored as trophies (Koontz 2001: 235).
In a religious sense the
ballgame sacrifice enhanced agricultural fertility and prosperity
(Koontz 2001:
235). The First Father, also called
Maize God, was responsible for the success or failure of corn crops. The cornstalk, male tassel, and foliage of a
mature corn plant were thought to embody him.
Ballplaying was so intertwined with him that his portrait was
incorporated into the hieroglyphic sign for ballplayer and ball playing
(Gustafson 2002: 172). He symbolized
agricultural fertility, and by allowing the blood of their enemies to
flow,
they evoked his power.
Iconography closely
associates the First Father with a beast called the Waterlily Monster.
This
Waterlily Monster symbolized connections that existed between ballgames
and
captive sacrifice following major wars.
In fact, the Waterlily Monster is the seed out of which the
World Tree
grows, and the ancient Mayan word for “large fruit-seed” also meant
“captive”
or “skull” (Chase 1992: 108). The World Tree apparently grows from
seeds that
are the skulls of captives.
Kings
depended upon sacrifice to validate their claims to the throne. Leadership developed along patrilines, but a
king could not claim the throne until he had performed a dedication
ritual. He
needed sacrificial victims for this purpose (Chase 1992: 100), and they
were
usually killed by decapitation (Wilkerson 1979: 117).
To recognize the importance of sacrifice, Mayans often put a
skull at the core of the ballgame’s rubber ball (Schele 1986: 249). The Waterlily Monster skull/seed metaphor
also applies here. The Hero Twins
gained their greatness through the loss of their father, but redeemed
him by
defeating his enemies. Kingship thus
grows out of a seed of sacrifice, metaphorically the sacrifice of the
First
Father, but even more directly out of the very skull that had been
separated
from an enemy’s body. The skull itself
was an important part of this system.
As we noted before, the word for “seed” was the same as the word
for
“skull” and “captive.” Rulership
literally grew out of the defeated man’s head.
The victor had proven, and enhanced, the power that gave him
rights to
rule.
I
have established that one cannot be masculine without power. Kings demonstrated their power through the
violence and subordination bestowed upon their captives.
It has been said that “because personal
power is often equated with physical dominance, violence is one method
by which
men assert themselves over other people”(Steinberg 1993:136). The ballgame sacrifices helped men assert
their
dominance over others. By humiliating
and then killing their enemies they placed themselves at the top of the
hierarchy.
One
of the most important parts of winning the ballgame was humiliating
one’s
opponent. In order to maintain rule, a
king would have to capture and humiliate his enemy (Schele 1986: 220). Ball courts all over Mesoamerica demonstrate
this principle. At Tonina, in Chiapas,
Mexico, the ballcourt seems deliberately constructed to commemorate the
humiliation of enemies (Houston 1998: 213).
Markers at this site (which players needed to hit to score
points) were
sculpted in the shape of captive bodies.
Over time they disintegrated, and appear to have been
re-sculpted into
the shape of human phalluses, “to be repeatedly battered and attacked
by human
players (Houston 1998: 213).” The
symbolic assault on captives’ masculinity seems very direct and obvious
here. The potency of the captive’s
genitalia (since the captor would undoubtedly win) was being called
into
question as his efforts to defend them were repeatedly denied.
The
imagery of ball courts always emphasizes some aspect of the loser’s
humiliation. Sponsors of that imagery must have wanted to emphasize it
for some
reason, and of course those sponsors were the victors themselves. There were specific conventions that
dictated how the artist depicted captives’ humiliation.
The captive was always shown
nude or nearly so (a particularly humiliating
situation for the elite, who normally were burdened with layers of
beautifully
woven fabrics and elaborate feather garments), with his arms bound
behind his
back with rope. Instead of the serene
faces that nobles displayed, captives were shown with grimaces; instead
of the
formal postures of victorious elite, captives were shown in unnatural,
awkward,
and contorted body positions (Chase 1992: 228).
Not only did kings want to humiliate their
opponents
at the moment of the contest, they also wanted to be commemorated as
having
done so in a permanent way. I suggest
that their manhood depended upon it.
They intended to subordinate captives by humiliating them, and
by
subordinating them they established themselves in positions at the very
top of
a tall hierarchical pyramid.
Some
define hegemonic masculinity as “the configuration of gender practice
which
embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy
of
patriarchy, which guarantees… the dominant position of men and the
subordination of women (Connell 1995: 77).”
Hegemonic masculinity motivated men to play the ballgame because
it
guaranteed them a privileged spot in the patriarchy.
Here is how: victors placed humiliated captives in an inferior
position. When they did this, they gave
manhood a positive connotation since manhood was equated with ball
playing and
victory. This zero-sum value, and by
extension this system, put some people higher and some people lower on
the
totem pole. Weak men and women were
excluded from access to power, and the hegemonic system remained in
place.
It follows that ballgames
absolutely had to be public. There had
to be an open and universally observed maintenance of masculine
hegemonic
values. Anthony Quinton asserts that
humiliation must always happen in the public eye. Without
the actual or implied presence of other people, things
simply aren’t humiliating (Quinton 1997: 80).
In fact archaeologists have found that most ball courts are
positioned
so to be seen by large crowds, thereby confirming this assertion
(Schele 1986:
247).
In
the final analysis, Mesoamerican ballplayers sought three things:
recognition
and transmission of patriarchal information, maintenance of hegemonic
masculine
values, and a very real quantification of one man’s dominance over
another. The myth of the First Father
reminded elite ballplayers about revenge, defiance of death, and
overcoming
obstacles of a nearly supernatural magnitude.
They sought to maintain their hegemonic position by making
themselves
the exclusive curators of these symbols, since no other member of
society was
granted the right to play. Also the
system helped them assign a point system to gender, which assured the
maintenance of hegemonic masculine values, and guaranteed them a
position at
the top. Finally, the game was a very
real and very direct demonstration of personal manhood.
Contemporary sports seem aimed at very
similar goals, but as our common understanding of gender progresses
towards
more equality for all gender expressions, the nature of sport will
probably
change right along with it.
References Cited
Bassie-Sweet,
Karen.
2002 Corn Dieties and the
Male/Female Principle. In
Ancient Maya Gender Identity
and Relations. Lowell
S. Gustafson and Amelia M. Trevelyan,
eds. Pp 169-190.
Connecticut: Bergin &
Garvey.
Chase,
Diane and Arlen Chase.
1992 Mesoamerican Elites: An Archaeological Assessment. Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press.
Connell, R.W.
1995 Masculinities. California: University of California Press.
de Garis, Laurence.
2000 ’Be a Buddy to Your
Buddy’: Male Identity, Aggression, and Intimacy in a
Boxing Gym. In
Masculinities, Gender Relations, and
Sport. Jim McKay,
Michael Messner, and Don Sabo, eds. Pp
87-107.
California: Sage Publications.
Freidel,
David with Linda Schele and Joy Parker.
1993 Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman’s Path. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc.
Hearn,
Jeff.
1992 Men in the public eye:
The construction and deconstruction of public men and public
patriarchies. New York: Routledge.
Joyce,
Rosemary.
1991 Cerro Palenque: Power and Identity on the Maya Periphery. Austin: University of Texas Press.
______.
2000 Gender and Power in Prehispanic Mesoamerica.
Austin: University of
Texas Press.
Koontz,
Rex with Kathryn Reese-Taylor and Annabeth Headrick.
2001 Landscape and Power in Ancient
Mesoamerica. Boulder: Westview Press.
Messner,
Michael and Donald Sabo.
1994 Sex, Violence & Power in Sports: Rethinking Masculinity. California: The Crossing Press.
Miller,
Mary.
1998 A Design for Meaning in
Maya Architecture. In Function and Meaning in
Classic Maya Architecture. Stephen
Houston, ed. Pp 187-222.
Washington, DC:
Dumbarton
Oaks Reasearch Library Collection.
Quinton, Anthony.
1997
Humiliation. Social Research 64(97):
77-89.
Schele,
Linda.
1986 The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art. New York: George Braziller, Inc.
Steinberg,
Warren.
1993 Masculinity: Identity Conflict and Transformation. Boston: Shambhala Publications, Inc.