30 May 2025 / 10 House
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Find out moreMaguey (century plant)
26th Feb 2024
Aloe vera or maguey illustrations by Keith Henderson
‘Surely, never did Nature enclose in so compact a form so many of the elements of human comfort and civilisation’ (William H. Prescott, The Conquest of Mexico, 1843 - the illustration shown here, by Keith Henderson, is from his book). The author was writing about the ubiquitous maguey (Agave americana), commonly known as the century plant or American aloe. Its uses to the inhabitants of Mesoamerica were described by the court physician to the king of Spain in the 16th century as ‘almost innumerable’. They still are... (Compiled by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore)
One of the best summaries of the maguey’s uses was penned by the great American Nahuatl scholar and linguist Thelma D. Sullivan, in 1982:-
’In addition to its employment in the weaving of cloth, its fibres were twisted into rope or made into sandals. Its thick centre stalk formed the main beam of many huts and the leaves served as roofing tiles. From the leaves, they also made paper. The thorns were used as needles and for the ritual drawing of blood, and the tender parts of the leaves and stalks were eaten or used for medicinal purposes, as were the roots. No part of the plant was left unused. The unfermented juice of the maguey was also employed as a remedy for many ailments and, like the bark of the cotton plant, was thought to induce menstruation. It was also believed to be efficacious as a cleanser of the kidneys and bladder and a dissolver of gallstones, and it is still used as a cure for stomach ulcers... (1982: 24-25).
The maguey plant - a succulent which is ‘not even remotely related to the cactus family’ (Coe, 1994: 78) - can grow to as much as ten foot wide and twenty foot tall. ‘The large, thick, fleshy leaves of agaves soak up moisture, storing it for the plant’s use during dry periods. A tall stalk grows from the centre of the leaves. It is topped with clusters of yellow flowers during the summer months’ (Dean Keoke & Porterfield, 2002: 5). The generic term ‘maguey’ has for general purposes replaced the original Nahuatl word metl. The plant is mentioned in great detail in the 16th century Florentine Codex, with a dozen or more varieties being described (pic 2). ‘It has branches, leaves. It is spiny. It has maguey tips, a centre, haunches, a maguey crown, a maguey root, a stem. It has an erudition, maguey syrup, unfermented maguey juice. It is juicy, fibrous, drooping, hanging. It has tapering leaves. It is green. It has a maguey bud, offshoots - an offshoot which can be planted, pressed in, transplanted, set out. It has dried magueys’ (Dibble & Anderson, 1963: 216).
The plant’s medicinal qualities occupy nearly an entire page in Book XI of the Codex, including recipes to recover from a relapse, to heal a wound (pic 3), to treat gout, to counter chest infections... Several other chroniclers attest to Sahagún’s claims of (warmed) maguey sap providing a highly effective antibiotic wound treatment: Motolinía, Las Casa, Hernández, Pomar... (Ortiz de Montellano, 1990: 182-184). Francisco Hernández - Spanish King Phillip II’s court physician and naturalist - mentions yet more medical benefits: to treat fevers, asthma, ulcers, to aid women’s post-natal recovery, to release limbs with post-convulsion paralysis, to clean the kidneys and dissolve kidney stones, to aid menstruation and clear the urinary tract, to soften the womb, to clear the bladder, as a general pain-killer... (1946: 1035-1047).
Even today, maguey sap (aguamiel or ‘honey-water’ in Spanish) ‘taken every morning on an empty stomach, is regarded as a general tonic: digestive aid, diuretic, and laxative, all in one’ (de Barrios, 1991: 20).
The maguey sap aguamiel, when fermented, becomes the moderately alcoholic drink pulque (originally called octli in Nahuatl), widely consumed throughout Mesoamerica. Pulque played an important role in public ceremonies and festivities. Vitamin-rich - a litre of it provides ‘a whopping 62 mg of Vitamin C’ (Ortiz de Montellano, 1990: 111), as well as other nutrients such as amino acids and some of the B-complex vitamins (de Barrios, 1991: 36) - and, being milky in substance, it was identified with mother’s milk in Central Mexico (Miller & Taube, 1993: 138). Significantly, 16 medicinal recipes described in the Cruz-Badiano Codex contain pulque as an ingredient (de Barrio, 1991: 20).
Happily, the maguey is a singularly hardy plant, which ‘can withstand extended drought, cold temperatures, and hailstorms, and is capable of thriving in impoverished soils - all common problems for agriculturalists in Anahuac [the Aztec world]’ (Parsons, 2008: 33).
One of the primary uses of maguey was as a foodstuff. The 16th century missionary Motolinía commented on the consumption of maguey worms by Aztec boatmen: ‘On this metl or maguey, near the roots, whitish worms generate, which are as thick as the quill of a wild turkey, and as long as half a finger. When roasted and salted these worms are very good to eat... As to the heads [the ball-like portion left after the leaves have been chopped off], if they are prepared by a competent cook, the slices are so good that the Spaniards relish them as much as they do well sweetened lemon preserves’ (quoted in Coe, 1994: 100, 94). Indeed, maguey worms continued to be recognised as a delicacy through the colonial period and beyond. Ortiz de Montellano quotes a 19th century writer describing them eaten toasted, ground up and mixed with salt, or fried in lard and eaten with tortillas as providing ‘such a tasty dish, that Parisian gourmets might prefer it to oysters from Ostend or swallows nests from China’ (1990: 119)
It appears that chewing roast maguey leaves is a truly ancient practice in Mexico; moreover, even if not eaten, the leaves could be used to line traditional underground ‘pit’ ovens (Coe, 1994). Indeed, different parts of the plant - leaves, roots, trunk, thick central stalk (quiotl in Nahuatl) - were used for a wide range of domestic construction purposes, including fuel, soap, household utensils, paper, even beehives... (Parsons, 2008: 35). Maguey fibre (ixtle) was woven into clothes, baskets and sandals (pic 7). The technology associated with tapping the resources of the great maguey plant has remained the same for countless generations. The collector of the sweet sap from the centre of the maguey, traditionally called a tlachiquero* in Mexican Spanish (tlahchiqui in Nahuatl, from ihchiqui, to scrape) uses a sharp blade (follow link below to see one close-up) to make an incision into the ‘heart’ of the agave, causing the plant to release its sugary sap, which can then be siphoned out, usually twice a day, using a long dry ‘bottle’ gourd bored at both ends, called an acocote (acocotli in Nahuatl) (see pic 6).
Maguey products of different kinds feature as tribute items delivered regularly to Tenochtitlan from a number of provinces - in particular Acolhuacan, Ecatepec, Acolman, Xilotepec and Acazacatlan, where it thrives in high, dry foothills of mountains. Much of this tribute took the form of cloaks, maguey leaves, fibres, prepared syrupy maguey ‘honey’ (from Axocopan and Hueypuchtla) (pic 8), and thorns - known as huitztli...
Apart from being ideal as simple needles, these agave spines were in high demand amongst the Mexica priesthood. The Dominican friar Diego Durán tells how the gathered spines were used. Following the midnight incensing ceremony, all the priests gathered in a large room filled with woven mats. After everyone was seated, they began to pierce their calves near the shinbone in order to draw blood, which was rubbed in front of the priests’ ears. The remaining blood was smeared directly onto the maguey thorns themselves.
These spines were then stuck into large sacrificial balls of straw, which were placed between the merlons of the courtyard wall as a visible symbol of the priests’ devotion. Durán says that because no thorn was used twice, the spines had to be removed daily. When the Spaniards arrived, they were dumbfounded to find so many thorns ‘so carefully kept and revered’ (Berdan & Rieff Anawalt, 1992: 2: 173).
The very name of one of the Mexica emperors - Tizoc - means ‘The Bled One’, and his name glyph consists clearly of a large maguey thorn piercing a stone (pic 9). Both naughty children and errant novice priests were under the threat of being punished, pierced with sharp agave needles - which Sahagún suggests came from a particular species of maguey, the patimetl.
Finally, whilst some early colonial sources suggested that some codices were made of agave paper - as well as the more common fig tree bark and deerskin - ‘so that one often finds descriptions of Mexican manuscripts in old catalogues with the annotation “written on maguey or agave paper”. However, results of more recent microscopic studies of native paper disqualify this statement for the majority of manuscripts. Most are written on fig (amatl) paper... In all, of 43 samples of native paper, [only] 4 documents were found to be of maguey paper’ (Berger, 1998: 10). Though the Franciscan missionary Toribio de Benavente (Motolinía) wrote that the best paper was made from maguey leaves, scholars today are more sceptical: whilst Elizabeth Hill Boone suggests that papers made of fig tree and maguey are ‘equally fine’ (2000: 23) - and gives an example of at least one, the Codex Huejotzingo which uses both - Uta Berger claims that ‘agave paper did not apparently provide a suitable paper for writing on. It is described as having a hard, stiffish quality combined with a greyish-yellow colour’ (1998: 10).
Sources/references:-
• de Barrios, Virginia Bottorff (1991) A Guide to Tequila, Mezcal and Pulque, Editorial Minutiae Mexicana, Mexico City
• Berdan, Frances F. & Rieff Anawalt, Patricia (1992) The Codex Mendoza, University of California Press; Volume 2 ‘Description of the Codex’
• Berger, Uta (1998) Mexican Painted Manuscripts in the United Kingdom, British Museum Occasional Paper no. 91
• Coe, Sophie D. (1994) America’s First Cuisines, University of Texas Press, Austin
• Dean Keoke, Emory & Porterfield, Kay Marie (2002) Encyclopedia of American Indian Contributions to the World, Facts on File, New York
• Dibble, Charles E. & Anderson, Arthur J.O. (1963) Florentine Codex, Book XI - Earthly Things, School of American Research/University of Utah
• Hernández, Francisco (1946) Historia de las plantas de Nueva España, vol. III, Imprenta Universitaria, Mexico City
• Hill Boone, Elizabeth (2000) Stories in Red and Black: Pictorial Histories of the Aztecs and Mixtecs, University of Texas Press
• Miller, Mary & Taube, Karl (1993) The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya, Thames & Hudson Ltd., London
• Ortiz de Montellano, Bernard R. (1990) Aztec Medicine, Heatlh and Nutrition, Rutgers University Press, London
• Parsons, Jeffrey R. (2008) ‘Environment and Rural Economy’ in Brumfiel, Elizabeth M. & Feinman, Gary M. (Eds.) The Aztec World, Abrams, New York
• Prescott, William H. (1922) The Conquest of Mexico, vol. 1, Chatto & Windus, London (original written in 1843)
• Sullivan, Thelma (1982) ‘Tlazolteotl-Ixcuina: The Great Spinner and Weaver’ in Benson, Elizabeth P. (organiser) 7 Hill Boone, Elizabeth (Editor) The Art and Iconography of Late Post-Classic Central Mexico: a Conference at Dumbarton Oaks, October 1977, Dumbarton Oaks, Washington D.C.
Picture sources:-
• Main: image scanned from Prescott (see above)
• Pic 1: downloaded from https://www.ebay.co.uk (Agave Salmiana Pulquero 30 seeds Jalisco Mexico)
• Pix 2 & 3: images rom the Florentine Codex (original in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence) scanned from our own copy of the Club Internacional del Libro 3-volume facsimile edition, Madrid, 1994
• Pic 4: image from the Codex Tudela (original in the Museo de América, Madrid), scanned from our copy of the Testimonio Compañía Editorial facsimile edition, Madrid, 2002 (bottom)
• Pic 5: image scanned from Hernández (see above)
• Pic 6: image scanned from Appleton’s Guide to Mexico by Alfred Conkling, 1895
• Pic 7: photos (top) by Jimena Larraguivel/Mexicolore; photo (bottom) downloaded from https://statemuseum.arizona.edu/online-exhibit/curators-choice/agave-scraper
• Pic 8, pic 9 (top R) & pic 10: images from the Codex Mendoza scanned from the James Cooper Clark facsimile edition, London, 1938
• Pic 9 (top L): image scanned from Codex Telleriano-Remensis by Eloise Quiñones Keber, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1995; photo (bottom) by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore
• Pic 11: photo downloaded from https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Live-fence-of-Agave-americana-delimiting-crop-lands-in-Salasaka-Central-Andes-of_fig2_325856865.
Aztec limerick no. 60 (ode to maguey sap) -
Treating war wounds? The savvy Mexica
Used maguey sap – it heals them much quicker;
When warmed it congeals
Dresses first, then seals –
Back to battle! But stronger, not weaker.
*NOTE: The author had the privilege of being a temporary ‘tlachiquero mayor’ in the summer of 1971, working as a volunteer in the village of San Isidro Buensuceso, Edo. de Tlaxcala.
Comments (1)
Daniel
6th Mar 2024
How can agave be used to make soap?
Mexicolore
We imagine it was one of the uses of the sap, but we’re not 100% sure. Certainly the fibres were used to make ‘zacate’ (loofah). We’ll try to find out more...
Aloe vera or maguey illustrations by Keith Henderson
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