Article suitable for older students

The amazing properties of Nahua baths

4th Jan 2023

Mexicolore contributor Julia Madajczak

We are sincerely grateful to Julia Madajczak, Researcher of Nahua language, culture, and history, Faculty of Artes Liberales, University of Warsaw, Poland, for this intriguing article she has written for Mexicolore on the ritual and sacred importance of bathing in Mexica (Aztec) society.

The cultural encounter between Spaniards and Nahuas of the Aztec state had one aspect that sources usually studied by historians cannot capture: smell. The Christian Spaniards did not like to bathe. They considered washing oneself a heathen and suspicious custom practiced by their arch enemies of the time, Muslims and Jews. A Spanish conquistador boiled his body under the metal armour for months before he decided to splash a bit of water onto his tortured skin. If he wanted to freshen up or come across as particularly elegant, he would just change his underwear - no need to go through all the hassle with water and soap! (Crow 2005: 33–34; Ashenburg 2008: 97–112)

On the contrary, the Nahua loved to bathe. They differentiated between water baths - in streams or lakes - and sweat baths - in the constructions called temazcalli. A cultured Nahua elite person had a daily-washed face and hands. They regularly attended a sweat bath in the company of their servants, who whipped their masters’ bodies with corn leaves. Pouring cold water onto the skin followed the sweat session (Durán 2006 I: 175–176). Squeaky clean, wearing airy cotton clothes and groomed hair, the nobles walked around surrounded by flower aromas from the bouquets they fancied carrying. Spanish conquistadors walked in a very different kind of aroma cloud.

So frequently did the Nahua practice cleaning for hygienic and ritual purposes that many Nahuatl metaphors rested on this concept. For example, “to wash another person’s mouth and hands” meant “to be a slave” (FC 6: 81). The Nahua washed their hands and mouths both before and after eating. The metaphor suggests that, among the elites, slaves did it for their masters. But whenever someone wanted to express their service and hospitability to their guest, they would send the slave away and personally do the chore (FC 6: 124). When a bride first entered her husband’s household, her mother-in-law washed her mouth and fed her, thus communicating a warm welcome (FC 6: 131-132).

Another body part among the Nahua that experienced frequent cleaning was the feet. From metaphors and other indirect information, we may presume that the Nahua used to wash their feet right after they came back home. For example, the merchants celebrated “the washing of the feet,” which happened soon after they returned from a long and arduous journey (FC 9: 27). On the festival of Teotleco, the elderly feasted “bathing the gods’ feet” after they saw a footprint in the scattered flour (FC 2: 119). The print meant that the gods had arrived on earth, and they now had to wash off the dirt of the trip. What kind of dirt stuck to the feet of the candidate for a ruler, whose installation rites were also called the “washing of the feet” (Alvarado Tezozomoc 2001: 270, 275)? Perhaps it was war dust from the expedition he had to lead to receive rulership. Or the “travel” he was returning from was more figurative than real.

Not everyone in Nahua society was so clean. Some groups of people, such as mourning families, priests, and - yes! - travellers, could high-five with the smelly Spaniards. The customs of the merchants suggest that after returning home, they were in dire need of washing more than their feet. They were not allowed to shampoo their hair the entire time they spent in distant lands (FC 9: 9). Their left-at-home families mirrored their behavior, washing their hair only every eighty days until the merchants came back (FC 4: 69). If they tragically did not, more filth awaited the grieving relatives. For eighty days following the funeral of their loved one, Nahua women could not wash their clothes, faces, or hair. We do not need to imagine their state after completing the mourning. The Dominican friar Diego Durán (2006 II: 155) vividly described it: “they had so much dirt on their faces, with all the dust that stuck to the tears they were crying that they looked like demons.” The elders then visited the women, and “with their fingernails, they scraped the crust of dirt built up on their cheeks” to offer it in the temples. This offering was called “the relics of the tears.”

If Fray Durán found the grieving women shockingly dirty, the Nahua priests exceeded everything the Spaniards had seen regarding the lack of hygiene. One of the Nahuatl terms for priests, papahuaque, “those of long and tangled hair” (Molina 1977 II: 79r), was a severe understatement. In the words of another friar, Toribio de Benavente Motolinia (1970: 67), these religious specialists “grew their hair very long, ugly, and dirty, for they never cut it, washed it, or combed it, and thus they walked around dread-locked. And they often painted themselves black, so they looked like not only the demon’s ministers but the demon himself.” Quite common, as we have already seen, a comparison of dirty Nahua to demons might have accidentally hit the spot. As Ryszard Tomicki (1987: 174-175) and Katarzyna Mikulska (2008: 337-366) suggested, long and tangled hair, as well as black bodies, were the attributes of the inhabitants of the Nahua Otherworld. By avoiding soap, water, and scissors, the papahuaque likened themselves to the rain deities of the paradisiacal Tlalocan and the bloodthirsty lords of the menacing Mictlan. At the same time, they did not look like living people - they were the Nahua walking dead.

Following this lead, mourners, travellers, and their families, by avoiding hygiene, could also, for some time, become more otherwordly than earthly. If the papahuaque constantly lived with the deities, the deceased laboriously moved through the Land of the Dead, and the merchants went to lands beyond the civilised, i.e., the human world. The eighty days of mourning or the period of the loved one’s travel were a liminal time that required suspending “the normal” (Burkhart 1989: 97). Perhaps by deliberately opening the door to the supernatural, the Nahua felt they prevented the uncontrolled rush of dangerous forces into their world. Through dirty bodies and clothes, they made sure their relatives would safely return home or - in the case of mourners - find rest. Nahua warriors, whose wives, during war expeditions, practiced the same abstentions as the merchants’ wives, believed that women’s dedication granted them success in battle (Alvarado Tezozomoc 2001: 139). Spaniards could sympathise with such a motif for renouncing personal hygiene. In 1601, Princess Isabel of Spain vowed not to change her clothes until the end of Ostend’s siege. Although her decision arose from a different religious background than the behavior of the Nahua wives, her motives - and their execution - were similar. A little more than three years later, she could sigh with relief and take off the hideous rags. It worked: the Spanish won (Crow 2005: 33).

While unwashed bodies clad in stinky rags could inspire Spaniards’ respect, unwashed bodies clad in flayed skins inspired nothing but horror. The custom of wearing a skin of a sacrificial victim for twenty days brutally exposes differences between Nahua and Spanish ritual hygiene or lack thereof. The skin-wearers, called tototectin, were the incarnations of the god Xipe Totec. They acquired the god’s identity by putting on the skins flayed from his previous representatives, sacrificed on the festival of Tlacaxipehualiztli. To maintain the non-human state, the tototectin were not allowed to bathe or wash their hair while impersonating Xipe Totec. After twenty days, the transformation into humans required a final offering of the skin, a special face treatment, and hair washing. Then the ex-god produced another incarnation of Xipe, dressing a chosen young man in the god’s attire. This new Xipe was called tetzompacqui, “he who washes one’s hair,” because he metaphorically washed his predecessor’s hair, relieving him from the divine burden (FC 2: 53, 56-57).

It should be clear by now that, for a Nahua, taking or avoiding baths was a serious deal. Under some ritual circumstances, it was the difference between remaining on earth or finding oneself in limbo. Christians also used dirt to distance themselves from their humanity. Still, the thought behind their asceticism was that bodies were sinful, and the more uncomfortable they got, the purer the souls. In Christianity, a dirty body was a way to plead with God - for the Nahua, it could be a way to become a god. But Nahua ritual baths were more complicated than that. While a liminal state of a semi-dead, otherwordly existence required abstaining from water and soap, bathing had a transformative power, which could entirely change the status of an individual. One could bathe oneself out of (like the tototectin did by washing their faces and hair) or into a divine state.

The transformative baths of the Nahua required unique concoctions that usually involved one key ingredient. This ingredient carried the essence of the being targeted in the ritual. For example, the tototectin who wanted to return to their human condition washed their faces with a mixture of water and corn flour. The reason was that, according to Nahua beliefs, human bodies were created out of corn - they were, in fact, corn. Through openings and pores of the face, the “humanness” contained in the mixture filtered into the temporary god’s system, activating the change. This procedure worked in the opposite direction, too. The slaves destined to turn themselves into god Huitzilopochtli’s incarnations had their faces sprinkled with huitzil-water. It came from the spring called Huitzilatl, bursting forth from a cave in Huitzilopochco - a place that myths connect with Huitzilopochtli. For yet another divine transformation bath, a person about to turn into the fire god used water heated over the fire. It is tempting to think that, in the Nahua world, anyone could turn themselves into anything they wanted by applying the correct liquid to their faces and bodies (Madajczak, in press).

The Nahua of the Aztec period appreciated both the civilising and magical properties of water. They used it daily to maintain hygiene and cultivate a cultured way of life, but they also used it to travel beyond the human world and back. Once the transformative liquid on their faces had turned them into gods, they would stop bathing and washing their hair. Thus, each day they assimilated more with the creatures of the Otherworld. Among the Nahua, it was easy to tell apart the living from the dead: the former were neat and smelled nice, while the latter “looked like demons.” The European authors often boasted that the Nahua took the arriving Spaniards for gods. Well, if the gods never bathed or changed their clothes and smelled like decaying corpses, the identification was well grounded...

Image sources:-
• Pic 1: photo by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore
• Pic 2: image from the Codex Magliabecchiano scanned from our facsimile edition published by ADEVA, Graz, Austria, 1970
• Pic 3: photo courtesy of and thanks to the author, by © Daniel Prusaczyk
• Pic 4: image supplied by the author
• Pix 5 & 6: Images from Codex Tudela (original in the Museo de América, Madrid), scanned from our copy of the Testimonio Compañía Editorial facsimile edition, Madrid, 2002
• Pix 7 8 & 9: images from the Florentine Codex scanned from our own copy of the Club Internacional del Libro 3-volume facsimile edition, Madrid, 1994.

References:-
• Alvarado Tezozomoc, Hernando (2001) Crónica mexicana, Dastin, Madrid
• Ashenburg, Katherine (2008) The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History, North Point Press, New York
• Burkhart, Louise (1989) The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth-Century Mexico, University of Arizona Press, Tucson
• Crow, John A. (2005) Spain: the Root and the Flower. An Interpretation of Spain and the Spanish People, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London
• Durán, Diego (2006) Historia de las Indias de la Nueva España e Islas de la Tierra Firme, 2 vols., edited by Ángel María Garibay K., Porrúa, Mexico City
• Madajczak, Julia (in press) “’The Bathed Ones.’ Transformation into Gods Among the Precontact Nahua,” Ethnohistory
• Mikulska, Katarzyna (2008) El lenguaje enmascarado. Un acercamiento a las representaciones gráficas de deidades nahuas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City
• Molina, Alonso de (1977) Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, 2 vols, Porrúa, Mexico City
• Motolinia, Toribio de Benavente (1971) Memoriales o libro de las cosas de la Nueva España y de los naturales de ella, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City
• Sahagún, Bernardino de (1950–82) Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain, 12 books, translated and annotated by Charles E. Dibble and Arthur J.O. Anderson, School of American Research and the University of Utah Press, Santa Fe and Provo
• Ryszard Tomicki (1987) “Poza społeczeństwem – w pobliżu boskości. Przyczynek do rozważań nad symbolika... włosów” [“Outside Society - Near Divinity. A Contribution to the Reflection on Hair Symbolism”], Polska Sztuka Ludowa 41: 169–176.

NOTE: This article includes results of my research carried out within the project no. UMO-2019/33/B/HS3/00528, financed by the National Science Center of Poland.