In Excess: Sergei Eisentein's Mexico - Cineclub

Mexico. It is evident that the choice of the pre-Columbian deities in the
“Prologue” was a result of Eisenstein’s dialogue with Brenner and Best
Maugard, among others.
In his letters to his friend, the actor Maxim Shtraukh, Eisenstein makes
direct references to a series of Mexican deities, demonstrating a high level
of familiarity with the subject, and “sadistic” pre-Columbian rituals, noting
that they had triggered his theoretical work. 40
What perhaps interested Eisenstein most was his belief that ancient
Mexican cosmology, as any traditional agricultural worldview, is marked
by a mythological or circular perception of time and history. The circularity
of life and death in ancient Mexican cultures—as in most premodern
agrarian cultures—is tied to the agricultural life-order and what is
now termed a “mythological” or circular perception of time and history:
death is always linked to rebirth, as in the natural life cycle. The worship
of death marks the ceremonial calendar of the Aztecs, for example. Out
of eighteen ritualistic celebrations in accordance with the Aztec calendar,
four are devoted to the offerings to the dead.
In the Maya and Aztec religions, the circularity and inseparability of
life and death, of birth and destruction, are best illustrated by the female
deities, who are central to the cosmology. The image of a goddess
is always dual: she is always a nurturing mother, the origin of life, the
beginning, but also the origin of destruction and death. The apocalyptical
aspect is very strong in the Aztec worldview: according to the Aztec
calendar, not only do each of the four ages of the world end with a terrible
catastrophe, but the end of each calendar division of fi fty-two years
is a time of doom, when the end of the world is expected with terror and
chastisements, and the continuation of life is celebrated as a miracle and
rebirth. 41 The origin of this destruction is almost always linked to a female
deity who brings it about. So, in pre-Columbian Mexican religions
the goddess is not only the traditional symbol of birth and fertility but
simultaneously (and equally importantly) the symbol of death and destruction.
Coatlicue, the Aztec goddess of earth and fertility, symbolizes
at once the matrix of all the living and the skull of death. The Maya goddess
Itzamana follows the same principle. She embodies the principle of
opposites: of life and death, but also of the masculine and the feminine.
The primordial Maya gods, the originators of life, are uroboric and bisexual.
42 One is designated as male (Ometecuhtli ) and the other as female
(Omecihuatl ), but both possess equal (which is to say independent and
self-suffi cient) reproductive organs. 43 Visually, the goddess is usually
endowed with phallic symbols and is either giving birth or devouring
a male deity. In the words of Mexican anthropologist Félix Báez-Jorge,
eisenstein’s ¡que viva méxico! : 43