by Peter Watson
When Europeans arrived in the New World, until that point the only balls they had experience of were made of wood, leather or cloth, and so their elasticity was limited. The Europeans were astonished at the ‘jumping and bouncing’ qualities (as Fray Diego Durán put it) of Mesoamerican balls.
The ulquahuitl, or rubber tree, can grow to a height of sixty-five or eighty feet, likes the company of other trees and prefers a humid climate. The white latex sap was collected by scoring a diagonal fissure in the greyish-brown bark and waiting for the tree to ‘bleed’. It was this association with blood that made rubber a sacred substance. Latex is viscous and whitish, though on exposure to air it turns thicker and changes colour, first becoming yellowish, then grey, and can finally turn black. Chemically, it is a polymer composed of carbon and hydrogen. Once collected, the latex is boiled with the juice or roots of certain other plants that grow in much the same region, notably species of the Ipomoea ‘Morning Glory’ families, which we have met before, as hallucinogens (and therefore also sacred to the ancient Mexicans), but which in this case add small quantities of sulphur to the mix, making rubber more pliable, more durable, and even more bouncy. The Codex Mendoza records that the province of Tochtepec (now Oaxaca) had to send to Tenochtitlánsome 16,000 rubber balls twice-yearly as tribute.21 The balls were constructed from simple lumps or in strips wrapped around each other, gradually building into a sphere. At other times the strips were rolled up like ribbons.
The religious associations of rubber balls were with movement and vitality. In the Nahuatl language there appears to be a close association between ‘rubber’ (olli) and ‘movement’ (ollin).* At the same time, the Yucatec Maya word, ‘k’ik’, means both ‘blood’ and ‘rubber’, and in the Popol Vuh the ball in the ball game is called quic, a Quiché term that also means ‘blood’.22 The round shape of the ball also associated it with heavenly bodies. In several instances depiction of balls in ancient paintings have inscriptions on them, invariably associated with the deities which represent the sun at the moment it descends into the Underworld, where it will die, only to be reborn later. In other representations, the ball may be superimposed with a skull or the decapitated head of a player who lost the game.
Contestants in the game wore special protective devices, because the ball was so heavy – their arms, wrists and knees were covered – and they also wore wooden, and in some cases stone, yokes around their waists, with protuberances attached, to help guide the ball. Sculptures of ball players show they could be maimed during the game (swollen eyes, for example) and this no doubt added to the excitement.
Most of the drama, however, was surely bound up with the gladiatorial nature of the contest in which the main purpose was to try the strength of a captive and test his desire to avoid death. Among the Aztecs, for example, war captives, already weakened by deprivation, were set successively against one another until only one remained. Losers were invariably sacrificed, their hearts ripped out and offered to the gods. Occasionally, and this takes some getting used to, their decapitated heads were used as the ball. Though gruesome, the inscriptions leave no doubt that this happened.23
The Aztec nobility played the game themselves, for pleasure, even fielding their own teams, with heavy gambling. Lower-ranked people apparently would risk their own children as wagers, and in some cases were even willing to be sacrificed themselves if they lost. According to Spanish chroniclers, great players were esteemed and could become the consorts of kings.24
But mostly the game had a religious significance. This is shown by the fact that the Maya version of the game also featured in their mythology. It is described in the Popol Vuh, in which the ball game was played by the Hero Twins. In this legend the brothers, 1 Hunahpu and 7 Hunahpu, were the best ball players on earth. But their relentless bouncing of the heavy rubber ball when they played the game disturbed and angered the gods who lived in Xibalba, the Maya Underworld, so much so that the malicious deities lured the twins down to a game. Through deceit the gods won, and the twins were sacrificed, one being buried, the head of the other hung on a tree as prominent evidence of the gods’ victory. Later, the daughter of an Underworld noble walked by the hanging head and spoke to it, whereupon the head spat into her hand, miraculously impregnating her. Outraged, her father commanded that she be sacrificed, forcing her to escape to the Middle World, and hide in the very house where the Hero Twins had grown up. There, she eventually gave birth to twins herself who, when they were older, found the ball game equipment of the original twins, learned how to play the game and this time deliberately provoked the gods of the Underworld so that they – angered all over again by the noise – invited the second set of twins to another game in the Underworld. This time the twins outwitted the Underworld gods, dismembering them before taking their own place in the Over or Upper world as heavenly bodies, identified as the sun and the moon, or the sun and Venus.25
This legend underlines the religious significance of the ball game, how it was conceived as yet another portal to the Underworld, how the captives taking part, though they were decapitated if they lost, were nonetheless part of a ritual which would take them to the heavens. In the Mayan manner the game was also considered a cosmic metaphor in which the ball, in being hit back and forth, replicated the movement of the heavenly bodies. The ruler, who may have started the game, was thereby seen as the agent who set the course of the heavens.
There was also a second form of the game, or a second stage, which was played against stairs, or stepped structures and was distinct from the game conducted on the courts proper. In this form, humans – possibly the losers in the games proper – were trussed up like balls themselves, and rolled down the stairs. This was surely a very painful process, and possibly fatal. Alternatively, it was the final ceremony prior to sacrifice itself.26
Sacrifice, say Schele and Miller, was a deliberate sequel to what took place on court, ‘an integral part of the ritual ball game cycle’.27 Glyphs associated with the ball game are often inscribed on staircases and risers. Defeated and decapitated captives are shown on inscriptions with streams of blood pouring from their necks, after their heads have been removed, the streams transformed into serpents which ‘water’ the land (figure 15).
In some cases the players are shown dressed as warriors, in jaguar suits defeating victims in bird suits.
There are some references to altered states of consciousness in connection with the game. At Chichén Itźá, one inscription shows a victorious player holding the head of a defeated opponent, with the rest of the loser’s body kneeling in front of him. Out of the neck of the kneeling player sprout seven serpents, but surrounding the scene is a plant, possibly a species of Datura, well known for its psychoactive properties. Water lilies are also shown, in abundance, on objects associated with the ball game. The most obvious association of water lilies is with water and fertility, but Michael Whittington says it is also significant that the rhizomes (horizontal, underground stems, from which roots proliferate) of water lilies are hallucinogenic and this raises the idea of entering a different reality via consciousness-altering substances. Water lilies are also a violent emetic, giving them an association with ritual purity. In the ball court relief at Teotihuácan, in the Tepantitla Palace, there is a depiction of Tlaloc with a water lily in his mouth and very possibly a hallucinogenic species of Morning Glory (Turbina corymbosa). Whittington observes that a Datura is probably represented in the relief on the great ball court at Chichén Itźá.28
Fig. 15 A decapitated ball game player, whose spurting blood has been turned into serpents.
Furthermore, ball game yokes sometimes show carvings of toads, especially the giant toad of Mexico, Bufo marinus, which contains hallucinogenic toxins. Decorated yokes first appear in the Protoclassic period bearing images of toads and felines, all identified with the Underworld.29
Possibly we can never recapture the entire meaning of the ball game. Were the representations of psychoactive substances evidence that hallucinogens were
used by the players, either during the game, or afterwards, during sacrifice? Or were they placed there as metaphors, metaphorical decoration, reminders that the ball game was itself a portal to an alternative world?
The ball game was most widespread in the late Classic period, when more than half the courts were built. In general open courts evolved into closed ones.30 The game passed into oblivion in Yucatán after the fall of Chichén Itźá though as we shall see it regained its popularity further north, later, among the Aztecs.
DARK SHAMANS AND THE MEANING OF PAIN
Bloodletting, sacrificial practices (such as hearts being ripped from living bodies), and the ball game, are the most studied aspects of organised violence and pain in the New World. For many years it was believed that such violence was practised only relatively late in the New World chronology, among the Toltecs (AD 800–1000) and the Aztecs (AD 1427–1519), for example. Scholars were not minded to explore practices elsewhere, believing that the early Spanish accounts were exaggerated by European religious zealots. Research and discoveries over the last thirty years, however, have totally transformed this view. We now know that organised violence was practised throughout all areas of Mesoamerica, from very early on, and from Costa Rica to Panama to central Mexico to Monte Albán (Oaxaca, southern Mexico), and right across northern South America – in Colombia, Nazca, Aspero, and among the Chavín, Chimu, Moche, Huari, at Tiahuanaco, throughout the Inca empire and many other places as well. According to John W. Verano, each year brings a significant new discovery.31 Again, it is not so much the level of violence that fascinates researchers, so much as its organised nature and the specific forms of brutality that existed, and attitudes and practices in regard to the associated pain.
We now know that child sacrifice was widespread, as was mass sacrifice, as was the decapitation of captives and the taking of trophy heads. We know that the forms of killing involved the ripping out of hearts from live captives, evisceration – the removal of entrails – decapitation, strangulation and garrotting, flaying, and being burned alive. We know there was teeth mutilation, that the ears of children in the cradle could be cut and there are several images of self-decapitation, though whether these images recall actual events or represent ideal moments in a religious ritual isn’t certain (figure 16).
It has also become clear in recent years that, in addition to the ball game, which often resulted in the sacrifice of the losers (and in some cases, in Tajín in Veracruz, for example, of the winners, on the grounds that the gods would be more likely to accept a petition from a victor), there were extremely brutal boxing matches, in which the contestants wore protective uniforms, including headgear (often in the form of jaguar masks), and fought with stone balls in their fists, or stone knuckle-dusters called manoplas which could inflict fatal injury.32 Images show boxers badly bruised and deformed; sometimes they are shown fighting jaguars who also wield stone balls in their fists. Alcohol was consumed at these events by the participants, who took part, apparently, while they were inebriated (figure 17).
Fig. 16 Stone relief of post-ball game self-sacrifice scene from the northeastern wall of the South Ball Court, El Tajín, Veracruz, Mexico.
Such was the prevalence of these events and occurrences that archaeologists and anthropologists have concluded that pain, which has no real meaning outside the medical realm in our own day, was laden with symbolic and ideological meaning in ancient America.
Pain, in fact, seems to have been related in an almost philosophical way with certain negative events in life. For example, Steve Bourget has produced evidence for a direct association between (at least four) sacrifices and torrential rain on the north coast of Peru, which may have been El Niño events. (Archaeology indicates that many other coastal sites in South America were damaged or destroyed by water in prehistory.)33 Among the Pachamac, the events of rain and sacrifice were also clearly related, though it is not specified as to whether sacrifice was designed to bring rain or avert it. Bourget found that there was a greater representation of sea lion remains associated with sacrifice, and with lomas, bands of fog vegetation appearing on certain slopes exposed to the prevailing winds during El Niño events. He argues that the lomas announced the impending El Niños and that, during the actual enso event itself, when the seas adjacent to the land warmed up, the normal foodstuffs of the sea lions were removed, they became angry and competed more directly with humans for food, causing great rivalry. Humans were therefore compelled to kill them in greater numbers than usual.
Fig. 17 Boxers in combat, showing protective clothing and stone balls in their hands.
In any event, El Niño events changed sacrificial behaviour. The form of child (or youth) sacrifice known as capac hucha was often carried out at high altitudes and at least in some cases (though by no means all) the children had zigzags painted on them, as though in dedication to lightning. Boxing contests were also sometimes staged on mountain tops.34
Weather, it has also emerged recently, was looked upon by many in Mesoamerica as a form of illness (and therefore implicitly painful) and natural disasters were regarded as diseases writ large. Flooding, for example, was regarded as an earthly form of diarrhoea, and drought as akin to dry skin. Weather shamans understood these links (flooding, for example, may have brought on water-related diseases, quite apart from any more or less obvious analogies), and violence in one form or another (bloodletting, for example, blood being associated with rain) was recommended as treatment, for both the catastrophe and the associated disease.35
The phenomenon of the ‘dark shaman’, or kanaimà, has recently been identified, in which the object is to create an atmosphere of terror and control in rural communities, the maleficent shaman transforming himself into a jaguar or other animals ‘for the purpose of implementing assault sorcery in order to punish and destroy an enemy’.36 The dark shamans were believed to influence bad weather – thunder, lightning, wind, floods, droughts, earthquakes – which could cause illness. They also poisoned (and in some remote rural areas of Guyana still poison) their prey in a way designed to provoke anxiety and terror, the coup de grâce being an attack on the victim from behind, the victim identified as a maleficent force, in which a sharp forked stick was thrust into the anus of the target, then forcibly withdrawn, bringing with it a section of the rectum and severing it ‘so as to produce a painful, wasting death’. The episode was not complete until the dark shaman had visited the grave of the maleficent target and tasted a sample of the decaying corpse, ‘by means of which he destroys the victim’s soul’. In many societies, jaguar-shamans were regarded as major sources of illness and, in return, if they could be captured they were themselves decapitated. Decapitation itself often played an important part in the defeat of maleficence, though it could also be associated with fertility and cosmogenesis.37
Dark shamanism may have been a newish development. If so, it contrasted with a very old shamanistic tradition which was still strong in Mesoamerica at this time – namely that, among the Maya, males sometimes donned female attire for bloodletting ceremonies. Much the same phenomenon occurred in Chile where males also assumed female guise to practise their craft. By the same token, Peruvian tapestries of this period, and Nazca pottery too, both show shamans turning into jaguars, condors and other animals, and (on cups) using hallucinogenic drinks. Shamanistic traditions remained strong.38
Still on the subject of pain and violence, there continues to be some doubt as to the exact nature of warfare in Mesoamerica. Was it the ‘Western’ kind, for conquest, or just to take prisoners who could be sacrificed? In the inscriptions of the Mesoamerican region there are several glyphs for war, which might indicate different kinds of battle. We know of ‘flowery wars’, low-intensity operations, to take a few captives or to probe the strength of the enemy – essentially propaganda skirmishes. There were also ‘destruction events’ and ‘shell-star’ events, the latter indicating in all probability territorial conquest. Without horses, or chariots, or metal weapons, it may have been s
imply too difficult for certain groups to hold territory they had taken in warfare, especially when their main aim was captives for sacrifice (though, as we shall see, the Incas and Aztecs managed it). And war, as has been noted, seems to have been more common in the eighth century, possibly having to do with climatic variation.39
The idea that pain, violence and sacrificial killing had a different meaning for the inhabitants of the ancient New World, compared with our own day, lies in several pieces of evidence. For instance, there is evidence that families who had sacrificed their children achieved a higher status as a result; there is evidence, noted above, that sometimes the winners in ball games were sacrificed; other evidence lies in the fact that in the gambling that was linked to the ball games (in the Aztec world, for example), people would gamble their own lives on the result; we know also that the high priests at Tlaxcala (a state that adjoined the Aztecs) tried to outdo each other in passing a higher number of sticks through their tongues – records show that some succeeded in passing 405 sticks, others in ‘only’ 200;40 there is also evidence that in some cultures trophy heads could be used as balls which ‘could jump, roll and fly’. Andrea Cucina and Vera Tiesler report that, in the lowland Mayan centres, ‘it was relatively easy to buy the sons and daughters of local slaves or orphans . . . when these means of acquiring infants were not successful, the natives’ deep faith induced them to offer their own sons or nephews.’ Suicide is unfortunately common enough in our own day, but the ancient inscriptions showing people beheading themselves, if they are to be believed, are also evidence of a very different attitude to pain. Finally, given what has gone before, what are we to make of the evidence from Adriana Agüero and Annick Daneels, that no one in Veracruz (where they carried out their research) lived more than an hour’s walk from a ball court? Watching painful, bloody and deadly contests was extremely popular.41*