This richly burnished hollow clay male figure sits
with an exaggerated phallus. He wears a large
headdress that hangs down on both sides of his
well-formed face. His back and chest are
enhanced with unusually shaped scarification
marks, each round mark slit in the middle with
incision although the figure's overt sexual
quality may seem exhibitionistic in our culture, it
possessed entirely different significance in
Ancient Meso-America. Considering the Meso-
American religious context, which indicates that
life, emerges from death, the figure with
exaggerated phallus symbolizes the regeneration
of life after death. Used as a ritualistic offering,
the figure's sexual characteristic served as a sign
of fertility and life. Considering such
connotation of fertility, the designed,
scarification-like marks could also represent
female genitalia, as seen on other Colima figures
with sexual attributes. The obsessive quality of
the repeated design all over the figure's back
and chest seems to strongly reinforce the
concept of life and birth. To people in late pre-
classic Colima, such artistic expression was
neither pornographic nor tabooed. This seated
male figure, thus, undoubtedly expresses the
importance of regeneration.
- (PF.2874)
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