The woman symbol in Maya weavings of highland Chiapas

30th Jan 2023

Christine Ever showing symbols on a Maya ceremonial weaving

We’re sincerely grateful to Professor Emerita Christine Eber (pictured right), anthropologist, President of Sophia’s Circle and Founder/Co-ordinator of Weaving for Justice, for writing for us this brief article on the rediscovery and symbolism of a traditional Maya weaving symbol. Weaving for Justice now works with 8 women’s weaving collectives in Chiapas - follow the link below to learn more about their pioneering work.

In the early 1990s, Tsobol Antsetik (Women United), a weaving collective in San Pedro Chenalhó, Chiapas, Mexico recovered an important design that had fallen out of circulation. During my Ph.D. fieldwork in Chenalhó in the 1980s, I did not study weaving, but I lived with a weaver, Flor de Margarita Pérez Pérez, and learned about weaving from her and other women in her community. I was interested in the variety of ancestral designs passed down to them from previous generations of weavers. One of these designs was a man symbol which had four fingers and toes, corresponding to the four corners of the milpa where men fulfill their roles as farmers, providing corn, beans and squash to feed their families.

I was curious why I never saw a woman design on any of the weavings. When I asked Margarita about this, she said she had never seen one. I chalked up the absence of a woman symbol to the male dominance that had intensified with Spanish colonization. Things of women fell away over the centuries, as did so much of Maya cultural heritage.

After many years of hearing me ask why they didn’t have a woman design in their corpus of weaving symbols, a member of Tsobol Antsetik asked her elderly aunt about the symbol. Her aunt thought that she had seen such a design on a ceremonial cloth called b’ut korision (sacrificial victim), which she kept in her home to loan to leaders of saints’ fiestas. The cloth has rows of saints, men, toads, and the bats’i luch, an ancient Maya cosmogram and is used to cover the ceremonial meals served to municipal authorities and leaders during fiestas.

The niece borrowed the cloth and brought it to the next meeting of Tsobol Antsetik where the weavers were delighted to see the rows of women symbols. Eventually someone copied the cloth and sent it up in a box along with other weavings that I was selling for the collective with help from friends and students. It was 1993 and I was teaching at Central Connecticut State University at the time.
When I pulled the cloth out of the box I immediately recognized the woman symbol because of her three fingers and toes and three lines descending from her vagina connecting her to Earth.

Beliefs in Chenalhó associate women with Earth which is conceived of as a mother. Three is the ancient Maya number for women, representing the three stones that hold up the comal, the clay griddle on which women make tortillas transforming the corn that their kinsmen harvest from their fields into food for humans.

I began to explore the origin of the number three and learned that it is connected to Maya creation myths in which the maize god Hun Hanahpu is said to have directed a set of gods to put the universe in order by setting up the cosmic hearth on top of three stones. The appearance of the three stones in the constellation of Orion on August 13, 3,114 B.C.E. marked the beginning of Earth’s creation.

Still today Maya women mirror the creation of the Earth when they transform corn into tortillas on a clay griddle held up by three stones (or sometimes other objects) that form the hearth of their homes.
Since the arrival of the ceremonial cloth in the U.S. in the early 1990s, the weavers of Tsobol Antsetik have made up for lost time by weaving and embroidering countless women symbols on textiles, from huipils to brocaded squares, to book marks.

Picture sources:-
• All pictures supplied by, courtesy of and thanks to Christine Eber, except for -
• ‘Three Stones Place’ image photo courtesy of and thanks to Justin Kerr (mayavase.com)
• Illustration of a comal and hearth stones by Felipe Dávalos/Mexicolore.