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Did women sing and dance in rituals like their male counterparts in Aztec culture?

Did women sing and dance in rituals like their male counterparts in Aztec culture?

Mexica-Aztec men and women hold hands as they dance together; Codex Durán

ORIGINAL QUESTION received from - and thanks to - Jedidiah Juke Hawkins: Did women sing and dance in rituals like their male counterparts in Aztec culture? (Answered by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore)

Yes, most certainly (see main picture, right, from the 16th century work of Fray Diego Durán)! For the Mexica-Aztecs dance allowed ordinary people an escape, a release, from every-day tensions: they were moments of joy and happiness. They inspired the Aztecs to do their best and more, both in civic life and in war. Dance performances generally recorded historical events and celebrated the successes of individual leaders. Dance also featured in many medical cures.
’Dance played an important role in ancient Mesoamerican religious ritual. Sahagún, for example, describes some sort of dance - sometimes of men, sometimes of women, and sometimes of men and women together - for almost every veintena [20-day ‘month’] celebration of the Aztecs, with dancing frequently carried on at the base of the pyramid of the god honoured on that occasion’ (Miller & Taube).

To give a couple of examples, Book 2 of the Florentine Codex includes the following description of dancing in the Toxcatl festival:-
’They [two “masters of youths”] caused the women to begin the dance; they danced leaping, dancing in the fashion of women. And the women were in the middle, holding their sacrificial banners in both hands. They danced and leapt about. And the priests also danced. It was called “the leap in the month of Toxcatl”’.
Picture 2 shows the sacred dance of the twelve Cihuateteo (women who died in childbirth), between the heavens and earth around the black-and-red Quetzalcoatl. Whilst this is a Mixtec ceremony, scholars agree that the dance traditions hold across the whole range of Mesoamerican cultures.

Sources:-
• Prokosch Kurath, Gertrude & Martí, Samuel (1964) Dances of Anáhuac - the Choreography and Music of Precortesian Dances, Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology, New York
• Miller, Mary & Taube, Karl (1993) The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya - an Illustrated Dictionary of Mesoamerican Religion, Thames & Hudson Ltd., London.

Picture sources:-
• Main: image scanned from Códice Durán - Historia de las Indias de Nueva España e Islas de Tierra Firme, Arrendedora Internacional, Mexico City, 1990
• Pic 1: image scanned from The Aztecs: People of the Sun by Alfonso Caso, University of Oklahoma Press, 1958
• Pic 2: image scanned from The Codex Borgia - a Full-Colour Restoration of the Ancient Mexican Manuscript by Gisele Díaz and Alan Rodgers, Dover Publications Inc., New York, 1993.

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Did women sing and dance in rituals like their male counterparts in Aztec culture?

Mexica-Aztec men and women hold hands as they dance together; Codex Durán

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