Daily Life of the Aztecs

by Jacques Soustelle

  Here we have an exceedingly violent case of socially defensive reaction against an equally violent tendency, whose existence has been historically proved, for when the conquest had destroyed the moral and judicial underpinning of Mexican civilisation, alcoholism spread among the Indians to an extraordinary degree.

  However, even so severe a system as this had to have some kind of safety-valve. Octli was not entirely prohibited. Old men and women were allowed to drink, particularly on certain holidays, and it was even conceded that they might get drunk. For example, when the 'baptism' or rather name-giving of a child was celebrated, 'at night the old men and the old women gathered to drink pulque and to get drunk. In order that they should get drunk a large jar of pulque was put before them, and the person who served it poured the drink into calabashes and gave each one a drink in turn. . . And the server, when he saw that the guests were not yet drunk, began serving them again in the reverse order, beginning at the left side by the lower end. Once they were drunk, they would sing . . . some did not sing, but held forth, laughing and making jokes; and when they heard anything funny they would roar with laughter.' 120 All this was as though the Mexicans, wishing to cut their losses, allowed the pleasures of drink only to those whose active life was over, while at the same time they set up a barrier of terrible punishments against indulgence by young people or middle-aged men.

  GAMES AND AMUSEMENTS

  We have already touched upon the realm of games and

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  amusement in speaking of banquets. No doubt these great feasts always had some relation to a religious festival or to a religious ceremony; but, like our wedding-breakfasts or Christmas Eve parties, they were also occasions for being merry with one's friends and relations. Those who had the means, and foremost among them the emperor, loved, as they ate or smoked, taking their cocoa at the end of the meal, to hear poems recited or sung to the accompaniment of flutes, drums and two-toned gongs (teponaztli). The guests themselves danced to the sound of these instruments, after the feast.

  One of the most valued delights was that of hunting. The common people may have hunted for the pot or to sell their game, but the nobles hunted for the pleasure of it. In their gardens and their parks, and in the game-filled countryside, they went after birds with their blow-pipes. ' Motecuhzoma, wishing to amuse himself, went with twentyfive of the most important Mexicans to a palace which he had at Atlacuhuayan, which is now called Tacubaya. He went into the garden alone to divert himself with killing birds with a blow-pipe.' 121 This is the blow-pipe that shoots baked-clay balls, and it had been known for a very long time throughout Mexico and Central America: it is the blow-pipe of the Quiché demi-gods in the Popol Vuh, and the same as that which is shown in the reliefs on a vase from Teotihuacán. 122

  There were also great battues, which took place particularly in the fourteenth month of the year, Quecholli, which was sacred to Uitzilopochtli, the god of war, and to the god of hunting, Mixcoatl. On the tenth day of this month all the warriors of Mexico and Tlatelolco met on the wooded slopes of Zacatepetl, and spent the night there in huts they had made from branches. At dawn the next day they ranged themselves in a long line 'like a single length of rope', and they drove the deer, coyotes, rabbits and hares forward before leaping in to attack the surrounded creatures. Those who killed a deer or a coyote were given a present by the emperor, who also provided food and drink for everybody. In the evening the hunters returned to the

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  city, carrying as trophies the heads of the animals that had been killed. 123

  The Mexicans were passionately addicted to gambling; and there were two games that fascinated them to such a pitch that some Indians finished by losing all their belongings and even their liberty, for they would come to the point of selling themselves as slaves: 124 these were tlachtli and patolli.

  Tlachtli, the ball game, had been played in Mexico from the remotest antiquity: courts have been found in cities dating from the height of the Mayan civilization, El Tajín and at Tula; the one at Chichén-Itzá in Yucatán is among the most splendid monuments in all Central America. Courts are often represented in the native manuscripts, and their plan is shown as a double T. 125 Two sides faced one another, one on each side of a central line, and the game consisted of causing a heavy rubber ball to pass into the other part of the court.

  In the side-walls there were two carved stone rings, and if one of the sides managed to throw the ball through either of them, that side won the game out of hand: this was an uncommon and a difficult feat, however; and it was made all the more so by the fact that the players were not allowed to touch the ball with either their hands or their feet, but only with their knees and their hips. The players threw themselves to the ground to get at the ball, and they received the full impact of it on their bodies when it was in flight; so, like modern Rugby or baseball players, they were padded and provided with knee-caps and leather aprons, and even with chin-pieces and half-masks covering their cheeks. They also wore leather gloves to protect their hands from the continual scraping on the ground. But in spite of all these precautions accidents were not uncommon: some players, hit in the stomach or the belly, fell never to rise again; and after the game most of them had to have incisions made in their buttocks to let out the extravasated blood. 126 For all that, the game was played with very great enthusiasm. Only the ruling class was allowed to play.

  Tlachtli certainly had a mythological and religious significance: it was thought that the court represented the

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  world and the ball a heavenly body, the sun or the moon. The sky was a sacred tlachtli in which divine beings played with the stars as their ball. But in the everyday life of the laity the game was the pretext for huge bets, in which great quantities of clothes, feathers, gold and slaves changed hands: it was essentially a game for great men; and for some of them it ended in ruin and slavery.

  Ixtlilxochitl tells how the emperor Axayacatl played against the lord of Xochimilco and laid the market-place of Mexico against a garden belonging to this lord. He lost. The next day Mexican soldiers appeared at the palace of the fortunate winner and 'while they saluted him and made him presents they threw a garland of flowers about his neck with a thong hidden in it, and so killed him.' 127

  Patolli was a game with dice, not unlike our game of ludo. The Codex Magliabecchiano shows four players sitting on the ground or on mats round a table shaped like a cross and divided into squares. At one side there is the god Macuilxochitl, tutelary deity of dancing, music and gambling, watching over them.

  For dice the players used beans marked with a certain number of pips; and according to the figures obtained at each throw they moved small coloured stones from square to square on the board. The winner of the game and the stakes was the one who first came back to the square he had started from.

  Patolli, like tlachtli, had a hidden inner meaning. There were fifty-two squares on the board, that is, the same number of years that are contained by the combined divinatory and solar cycles. Patolli is still played: or at least it was still played twenty years ago, among the Nahua and Totonac Indians of the Sierra de Puebla. 128 Unlike the aristocratic ball game it was the most generally played game in all classes, and in it the Indians' passion for gambling could run unchecked. It is a curious fact that the Aztecs, although they were so puritanical about drinking and although their sex-life was so restrained, never seem to have tried to curb gambling. The divinatory books go no farther than warning those who were born under certain signs such as ce calli,

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  for example, 'one -- house', that they would be great gamblers, and that in gambling they would lose all their possessions. 129

  THE RHYTHM OF DAY AND NIGHT

  The Mexicans, having neither clocks nor clepsydras, nor sundials either, could not divide their days with any precision. However, a life of intense social and ritual activity presupposes the existence of certain fixed points, those which Muñoz Camargo calls the 'hours and mo
ments (fixed) for the government of the republic'. It we are to accept what this chronicler says, the trumpets and conchs were sounded from the top of the temples of Tlaxcala six times every twenty-four hours, to wit, at the rising of Venus, in the middle of the morning, at noon, in the middle of the afternoon, at the beginning of night, and at midnight. 130 Still, expressions such as 'the middle of the morning' or 'the middle of the afternoon' are, in the absence of a time-measuring machine, necessarily uncertain; yet it is true that the priests knew how to make observations of the heavenly bodies, of the sun's course and of the movement of certain stars. They were therefore able to fix the intermediary points between the east and the zenith and between the zenith and the west with a reasonable degree of accuracy. At night, they watched Venus and the Pleiades.

  According to Sahagύn, the temple drums and conchs marked nine divisions in the twenty-four hours: four during the day -- at sunrise, the middle of the morning, noon and sunset -- and five during the night -- the beginning of night (the end of the twilight), the hour for going to bed, the hour when the priests were to get up to pray, 'a little after midnight', and 'a little before dawn'. 131 Some of these divisions were therefore quite long, the equivalent of three or four hours; and others were very short.

  The notion of an abstract time, susceptible of division and calculation, never seems to have arisen. But the days and nights had their rhythm; and this rhythm originated from the temple-tops, the towers of the gods and of the ritual that dominated the countryside and regulated human

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  existence. By day, above the noise of the moving city, or in the silence of the night, there would come the sudden harsh cry of the conchs and the melancholy roll of drums to mark the stages of the sun or the stars; and at each of these stages the priests offered up incense to the sun or to the lords of the shadows. It is very likely that these fixed points were used to determine the time for meetings, to call councils and to open or close judicial hearings. The temple instruments ordered the day as the church bells might in a Christian community.

  One might have supposed that a civilisation that was almost without artificial light must have found its activities cut short by the fall of night; but this was not so. There were the priests who got up several times in the night to pray and chant, the youths from the local schools who were sent to bathe in the icy water of the lake or the springs, the lords and the merchants who feasted, the furtive traders who glided over the lake with their canoes loaded with wealth, sorcerers going to their sinister assignations -- a night-life that animated the darkened city. And the night, too, was pierced here and there by the glowing hearths of the temples and the glare of resinous torches.

  The dark hours of the dreaded yet alluring night offered their cover for the most sacred rites, the most important visits, the loves of the warriors and the courtesans. Often the emperor would rise, to offer his blood in the darkness and to pray. A watcher with preternaturally acute senses, gazing over the whole valley from the top of one of the volcanoes, might have seen here and there the flickering of the flames and have heard the music at the banquets, the beat of the dancing, the voices of the singers; and then, at intervals, the roll of the teponaztli and the scream of the conchs. So the night would pass away; but at no time was the dark vault of the sky without its human observer -- the anxious watch for a tomorrow that might never come. Then the dawn came and above the rumble of the waking town the triumphant cry of the sacred trumpets rose towards the sun, the 'turquoise prince, the soaring eagle'. A new day was beginning.

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  CHAPTER FIVE

  FROM BIRTH TO DEATH

  Baptism. The reading of the omens: giving the name--Childhood and youth, education. Infancy: the two systems of public education--Marriage, family life. Leaving school: Rôle of the marriage-brokers: weddings: chief and secondary wives: the polygamous family: woman's status in Aztec society: adultery and divorce: birth of a child: apotheosis of women dying in childbirth--Sickness and old age. Physicians and healing-women: accepted opinions on sickness: charms and spells: medicinal plants: place of the old in society: the rite and the significance of confession--Death and the hereafter. The funeral rites.

  BAPTISM

  When a child was born into a Mexican family, the midwife who had taken care of the delivery acted as priest and saw to the fulfilment of the rites. It was she who addressed the baby and welcomed it, saluting it with the names of 'precious stone, quetzal-feather', and at the same time warning it of the uncertainty and the sorrows of this life -- 'Here you are, come into this world where your parents live in toil and weariness, where there is over-much heat, and cold and wind . . . we cannot tell if you will live long among us . . . we cannot tell what kind of fate will be yours." 1 All these traditional themes were to be repeated an indefinite number of times in the ceremonies that followed.

  The midwife cut the baby's umbilical cord; but not without haranguing him at length. If it were a boy, she said to him, 'Dear son . . . you must understand that your home is not here where you have been born, for you are a warrior, you are a quecholli bird, and this house where you have just been born is only a nest . . . your mission is to give the sun the blood of enemies to drink and to feed Tlaltecuhtli,

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  the earth, with their bodies. Your country, your inheritance and your father are in the house of the sun, in the sky.' And to a girl she would say, 'As the heart stays in the body, so you must stay in the house; you must never go out of the house . . . you must be like the embers in the hearth.' 2 Thus from the first moment the man was devoted to the fate of a warrior and the woman to that of a Cinderella seated by the fireside.

  Then the midwife washed the child, praying to Chalchiuhtlicue, the goddess of water, 'Goddess, be pleased that his heart and his life may be purified, that the water may carry away all stain, for this child puts himself in your hands, oh Chalchiuhtlicue, mother and sister of gods.'

  As soon as the birth was known in the family and the locality, or even for the great families as far off as in other cities, the complex ceremonial of the 'salutations' began. The old women of the family thanked the midwife solemnly, and she answered in a speech full of imagery. Chosen orators, usually old men, went to greet the new-born child, and other old men appointed for the purpose, answered with long discourses. 3

  The Aztecs' taste for rhetoric found satisfaction in endless pompous dissertations upon the favour of the gods and the mysteries of fate. Times beyond number the baby was compared to a necklace, to a jewel of precious stones, to a rare feather. The child's mother was extolled, she 'who was the peer of the goddess Ciuacoatl Quilaztli'. They boasted about the glorious history of the family. If the father were a dignitary or a lawyer he was reminded of 'his office and its great importance and its great weight in the courts and in the government of the state'. 'Lord,' they said to him, 'it is truly your image, your likeness: you have a scion -- you have flowered!' From time to time (and this was one of the obligatory figures in fine language) the orator would excuse himself for going on too long. 'I am afraid of wearying you and of giving you pains in your heads and your stomachs.' Then he would go on with renewed vigour. Those who spoke on behalf of the family would return thanks in an equally garrulous manner. At

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  last those who had come to greet the baby gave their presents: there would be an many as twenty or forty cloaks or suits of clothes among people of the ruling class; but among the plebeians the presents would only be food and drink.

  During these festivities, the father would send for the tonalpouhqui, or soothsayer, a specialist in the study of the sacred books. This person, who was offered a meal, as well as his fee of cloth and turkeys, began by asking the exact moment of the birth, so that he might decide what sign the child was born under. He then consulted his tonalamatl to find the sign of the day of the birth and the set of thirteen days to which it belonged.

  If the sign of the day were considered good and fortunate, he could say 'Your son is b
orn under a good sign. He will be a lord or a senator, rich, brave, pugnacious; he will be courageous and he will shine in war; he will reach high rank among the commanders of armies.' And then one could go on to the naming of the child the next day. But if the sign of the day proved to be calamitous, then the tonalpouhqui exercised his wit to find a better sign in the same set of thirteen, as nearly as possible in the four following days. 'The child is not born under a good sign,' he would say, 'but in this series there is another, a reasonable sign that will diminish and correct the unfortunate influence of the principal sign.' This was usually possible, since the signs that carried figures greater than ten were always favourable, as well as those that had the figure seven. 4 At a pinch, it was possible to delay the baptism for more than the ordinarily allowed four days.

  The naming itself was carried out not by the soothsayer, nor by a priest, but by the midwife. The ceremony had two parts, the ritual washing of the child and the actual naming.

  They began by getting ready a great deal of food and drink for the family feast that would follow the baptism; they also made a little shield, a bow with four arrows, each corresponding to one of the cardinal points, if the child were a boy, and little spindles, a shuttle and a box if it were a girl. All the relatives and friends gathered in the mother's house before sunrise.