page_title: Women in Muisca society
section_title: Lake Guatavita
hierarchical_section_title: Women in Muisca society / Religion and mythology / Lake Guatavita
caption_attribution_description: Español: La "gran" pequeña laguna de Guatavita al atardecer en un soleado día.
context_page_description: The Muisca are the original inhabitants of the Altiplano Cundiboyacense before the Spanish conquest of the Muisca in the first half of the 16th century. Their society was one of the four great civilizations of the Americas.
  Women were important and considered egalitarian to men in most cases in the Muisca society. While the men were tasked with hunting, warfare, and other activities, the women performed the sowing of the farmfields, the preparation of foods and chicha and the education of children. The participation in the religious rituals was of both genders. The most important deities of the Muisca were female; Chía as goddess of the Moon, Huitaca of sexual liberation and Bachué the mother goddess of the Muisca people.
  While the first chroniclers were all male, during the period of conquest and early colonisation Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, Pedro Simón, Juan de Castellanos and Lucas Fernández de Piedrahita, 20th and 21st century anthropology has been conducted by many women scientists.
context_section_description: A story in the Muisca mythology about the wife of the cacique of Guatavita tells about her disloyalty to her husband. As punishment for this act, the people tortured her lover, a guecha warrior, by cutting off his private parts and eat them in a ceremonial ritual. The wife of the cacique jumped into the lake with her son and drowned. The cacique mourning the deaths, ordered to retrieve the bodies from the lake.
  This history formed the basis for the sacred Lake Guatavita and the later legend of El Dorado, as narrated by early Spanish chronicler Pedro Simón.
caption: Lake Guatavita
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