They knew this, as they sent their sons to practice the arts of war and learned to construct maces with bits of jutting obsidian glass embedded in them. In the midst of words of love addressed to their “little doves,” mothers taught their children that the world was a dangerous place. “On earth we live, we travel, along a mountain peak. Over here is an abyss, over there is an abyss. If you go this way, or that way, you will fall in. Only in the middle do we go, do we live.”54
