Two spirits

     "What then was the berdaches’ religious role on contact with the Spaniards?  Rather than being prophetic politicos, the berdaches seem to have held a role best described as sacrificial.  The stage for this discussion may be set by an insightful, but to date unreplicated statement of Las Casas, who claims that natives in the Tierra Firme thought the gods were pleased if young boys were prettified as girls before they were sacrificed.  Sacrifice appears close to the surface in much that touches on the berdache in religion.  As we shall see in the Andes, mid-sixteenth-century berdaches were ceremonially and sacrificially raped by big men during temple services, while the nineteenth-century Peublo Americans still practiced something similar on their berdaches during corn festivals.  In such instances, the berdaches appear to have been sacrifices to the deities, and, in my view, this practice is at one with the sexual sacrifice accorded the Peruvian god Pachacama [(Pachacámac)], which seems to have consisted in bent-over subjects at prayer presenting their hindquarters for anal penetration to the god, that is, to his priests."

     Richard C. Trexler, "Gender subordination and political hierarchy in pre-Hispanic America," chap. 2 in Infamous desire:  male homosexuality in colonial Latin America, ed. Pete Sigal (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2003), 77-78 (70-101).  See also 80 and 95n35.  According to the 2nd 2005 edition of the Encyclopedia of religion, sv Inca religion (and other entries), Pachamama was at least sometimes (?) Pachacámac's consort.  (But I need to do a lot of further reading!)