Status: Probably Real
An anonymous contributor sent me a link to
this image depicting an ancient Huichol Indian labor pain relief technique. The text reads:
Huichol Indians are descendants of the Aztecs, and live in the mountains of North Central Mexico. During traditional childbirth, the father sits above his labouring wife on the roof of their hut. Ropes are tied around his testicles and his wife holds onto the other ends. Each time she feels a painful contraction, she tugs on the ropes so that her husband will share some of the pain of their child's entrance into the world.
Do the Huichol Indians really have such a custom? I assumed it was a joke, but after googling for a bit I came across a
scholarly article that mentions this practice and also provides a source to back up the claim. The birthing tradition is mentioned at the very end of the article (I don't know who the author is):
I would like to leave the audience with one parting thought/image, from a
yarn painting pictured in
Art of the Huichol Indians (Kathleen Berrin, ed., 1978), which was created by Guadalupe, who was married to Ramón Medina Silva (a mara’akáme). The two of them participated in the filming of a peyote hunt (pilgrimage) in 1968, which became a documentary, To Find our Life (Furst 1969), and were the subjects of several ethnographic works on the Huichol... Here is the title of the painting and description (from the book):
How The Husband Assists in the Birth of a Child:
According to the Huichol tradition, when a woman had her first child the husband squatted in the rafters of the house, or in the branches of a tree, directly above her, with ropes attached to his scrotum. As she went into labor pain, the wife pulled vigorously on the ropes, so that her husband shared in the painful, but ultimately joyous, experience of childbirth. (Berrin 1978: 162)
So, given that the scrotum-tied-husband custom is apparently mentioned in Kathleen Berrin's
Art of the Huichol Indians, I'm inclined to believe that the custom is real. Though, of course, the Huichol woman who created the yarn painting may have intended it as a joke. I'll need to do more research to get to the bottom of this.
Comments
is there not a possibility that that wife might tug a bit too strong and pull the scrotum off?
And, guys, just because the pain is "shared" doesn't mean it's halved, okay?
http://freshgasflow.com/visual/digital_art/share_the_pain.htm
Couldn't the same operation be performed with him anywhere reasonably near the mother-to-be?
At least some of it.
It is aztec.
Which is more, the only "proof" of this custom is always this same drawing on top of this page, and no other document can be seen on the internet. Even on youtube.com you can only see a video of the same picture, and not the act of giving birth itself, which inlines me to think that this a beautiful hoax.
Don't you think it is quite difficult nowadays to not to have a hundred documentaries illustrating the process?? I think that no tv channel would miss the opportunity to show this habit at prime time...
The things them heterosexual people do....
😊
I personally never meet Ram
When my son was born I was wearing traditional dress to welcome him into the world but I can tell you, I was there to hold my new son. I was not crouching on a roof with rope around my nuts.
We are contemporaries of the Aztecs and anthropologists like to say we were there first. We have a spiritual explanation for our creation which works for us and it does not matter who came first. We survived my moving to the high mountains as did other civilizations of Central and South America as our Aztec friends were killed by Spanish guns, smallpox and religion.
The point is, I was in a Huichol village just 2 days ago, before making the adventure back home. I can tell you from personal experience that while I don't know anything about this tradition and haven't ever heard of this being the case, I, knowing the Huichol people, doubt that this is their type of tradition.
Also, knowing their sense of humour, I could definitely see the women making this up as a joke.
😊
Baby, Look, you tugged to hard and now he will never have a little sister. :-D
Interesting read though
So, she can't see that he's actually not really there!