Article suitable for older students

Question for October 2021

Which other foods were sacred apart from maize?? Asked by Putney High Junior School GDST. Chosen and answered by Dr. Catherine DiCesare

Besides maize, cacao - or chocolate - was probably the best-known sacred food in Mesoamerica. Cacao was sacred to the Maya as well as the Aztecs. The cacao was used to create a special drink, often mixed with additions such as ground maize or flavorings like chile peppers and vanilla. The famous ceramic pot known as the “Princeton vase,” seen in Pics 1 and 2, shows us how the Maya mixed the drink. At the far right of the scene we see a woman holding a vessel very similar to this vase. She appears to be pouring the cacao beverage into another vessel (no longer visible), positioned on the ground below. In this way they would create a kind of froth on top of the cacao beverage.

The cacao beverage was consumed in all kinds of ritual ceremonies. Among the Maya the cacao was also used as an offering to the dead, perhaps as a way to communicate between realms. Numerous ceramic vessels associated with cacao have been found in Maya tombs. This vessel (Pic 3), for example, comes from an elite fifth-century tomb in Guatemala. Its hieroglyphic text actually includes the hieroglyph for the word cacao (“ka-ka-wa”) on the lid. When scientists tested the substances found inside the vessel, they discovered traces of a substance known as theobromine, indicating that this vessel probably once contained cacao.

The Aztecs celebrated many different kinds of food as sacred gifts provided by the earth. Sacred foods play an important role in Aztec histories and myths as well as in different rituals. The Aztec historical chronicle known as the Legend of the Suns describes the god Quetzalcoatl breaking into the rain god Tlaloc’s mythical “Mountain of Sustenance” to steal away things like chia, beans, and amaranth (along with the ever-important maize) in order to feed newly-created, hungry humans.

Sacred foods played an important role in the annual ritual ceremonies that the Aztecs celebrated. The Aztecs petitioned the gods of the earth and the rain to continue providing the people with food by offering back to them those very same foods. Sometimes the offerings were elaborate dishes, while at other times the food would be made into special offerings to give to the gods. For example, amaranth seed dough was used to make images of the gods, embodiments that actually manifested the god’s presence during ceremonies. During the important festival of Panquetzaliztli, dedicated to the Aztec tribal deity Huitzilopochtli, the god was embodied by a dough figurine that was made out of amaranth seed. After a series of events in which warriors ritually “captured” and dismembered the amaranth-dough figure of Huitzilopochtli, the warriors took the dough pieces home to their families and neighborhoods to be ritually consumed.

Amaranth dough figures could also represent the various sacred mountains found in the surrounding landscape. They were known as the tepictoton, the “little molded ones.” They were closely related to Tlaloc and the rain gods, who were believed to reside in the very same mountains. According to the chronicles of the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún, those little molded mountains were quite lifelike, made to “look like men,” with teeth of gourd seeds and “fat black beans” as eyes.

Salt was one more important food substance that the Aztecs specially celebrated in their sacred ceremonies. Mesoamericans recognized that salt was vital for human health and the proper functioning of the body. It was also a major commodity in the Mesoamerican economy and important to the process of dyeing textiles. The “Goddess of Salt,” Huixtocihuatl, was celebrated during the annual summertime ceremony known as Tecuilhuitontli. The sixteenth-century chronicles call Huixtocihuatl the “elder sister” of the rain gods.

During the festival, the Aztecs celebrated Huixtocihuatl with a big feast. The celebrants were primarily those associated with the production of salt. Sahagún mentions “the old men, the salt people, the salt makers, the salt preparers, and the salt merchants, the salt traffickers, the people of the salt marshes.” All of them got together to celebrate the salt. In the process, they imbibed great quantities of the sacred beverage known as pulque - yet another sacred beverage! These are just some of the foods and drinks that were sacred in Mesoamerica. The Aztecs and the Maya alike developed all kinds of rituals designed to thank the gods and the ancestors for the bounty that the earth brought forth.

Further reading:-
• Bierhorst, John, trans. The Legend of the Suns, in History and Mythology of the Aztecs: The Codex Chimalpopoca. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992.
• Coe, Sophie D. and Michael D. Coe. The True History of Chocolate. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1996.
• Morán, Elizabeth. Sacred Consumption: Food and Ritual in Aztec Art and Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016.
• Staller, John and Michael Carrasco, eds. Pre-Columbian Foodways. New York: Springer, 2009.
• Stuart, David. “The Rio Azul Cacao Pot: Epigraphic Observations on the Function of a Maya Ceramic Vessel.” Antiquity 62 (1988): 153-57.

Picture sources:-
• All pictures kindly supplied by Dr. Catherine DiCesare, with the exception of pic 4 - public domain and pic 7 - scanned from Arqueología Mexicana vol. XXI no. 122, July-August 2013.

Dr. Catherine DiCesare has answered 4 questions altogether.

Did the Aztecs celebrate gods’ birthdays?

Which other foods were sacred apart from maize?

How heavy would one of the skull masks have been?

Did they celebrate a different god every day?