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Feature

Dave Brian Butvill

The cacao god uses a special whisk, or molinillo, invented by the Spanish to whip a head of foam onto cacao drinks.

Once a year in the sprawling Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, commoners and elite gathered at the Great Temple for a spectacular religious event. A war captive, decorated in the iridescent green feathers and elaborate jewels of Quetzalcóatl, the god of advancement, would be escorted onto the sacrificial stage. There he was informed of his imminent execution, and then ordered to honor the powerful deity by dancing.

If his performance lacked animation—out of fear, perhaps, or sorrow—the priests overseeing the ritual would stop him and, according to the detailed records of Franciscan missionary Diego de Durán, "...they went immediately to procure sacrificial knives, washed off the human blood adhering to them. . .and with that filthy water prepared a gourd...giving it to him to drink."

To witnesses it appeared a beverage of blood. But dissolved in the murky elixir was a potent drug said to energize the captive and make him forget his fate. Knowing that upon completion of his dance his heart would be extracted from his body and presented to the heavens, he nonetheless, Durán writes, "returned to his usual cheerfulness and dance…. It is believed that he offered himself for death with great joy and gladness, bewitched by the beverage."

What powerful substance could replace fear and helplessness with spirit and courage? Nothing less than the food of the gods: chocolate.

If there is any truth to modern claims that eating chocolate lifts the blues, relieves stress, and awakens carnal desires, then perhaps the war captives of Aztec times truly did experience a euphoric ending to their earthly days. For while most modern chocolate is little more than sugar and a smattering of cocoa bound together with low-cost vegetable fat, the product of the Aztecs was pure, 100 percent natural, and contained a potpourri of stimulants and other ingredients foreign to the heavily processed chocolate of today. In terms of cocoa content alone, drinking one small gourdful would be like downing several dozen Hersheys bars in a single sitting.

Mood-altering effects aside, chocolate, and the cacao beans from which it's derived, had an importance to the Aztecs that went far beyond any buzz. At once a sustaining meal and medicine, a flavoring, and even currency, cacao was also a fine luxury reserved for the most important events, and people. Chocolate was the obligatory champagne at weddings, and the top-shelf brandy to end a royal meal.

Yet the chocolate tree, Theobroma cacao, has never grown anywhere near the Aztec region of central Mexico. Cacao was initially foreign to the Aztecs. "They were [initially] like barbarians," says Yale professor emeritus of anthropology Michael Coe, coauthor of the authoritative The True History of Chocolate. "They hadn't the foggiest idea what chocolate was." Turns out, the Aztecs were the lucky beneficiaries of a chocolate craze that began more than two millennia before they arrived on the Mesoamerican scene.

By the late fourth century ad, about a thousand years before the Aztecs appointed their first king, the Mexican city of Teotihuacan had risen to become North America's first true urban center. Located on the semiarid altiplano, or high plateau, in the Valley of Mexico, the eight- to ten-square-mile complex of towering pyramids and wide streets, decorated plazas and blocks of apartment buildings, supported on the order of 200,000 citizens.

An economic empire whose founders remain a mystery, Teotihuacan boasted more than 500 workshops which churned out clothing, jewelry, ceramic dishware, and weapons and tools made of obsidian. They traded for raw materials such as cotton, jaguar hides, and jade as well as rare feathers and shells with peoples throughout the valley and the Gulf Coast.

With most of Mesoamerica within its economic grip, Teotihuacan set its sights on the far-off Maya in the swampy Guatemalan lowlands. The sophisticated Maya, the intellectuals of Mesoamerica who'd mastered hieroglyphic writing, mathematics, and astronomy, controlled the main trade route between the Mexican highlands and a vast area of resources spanning from northern Yucatán to the Pacific coast of El Salvador. 

They also built an industry and a culture around a sacred plant abundant in the humid and dense forests among which they lived. In doing so, they created an insatiable demand for the production and distribution of its seeds, which they called kakaw. They all but monopolized the market, and Teotihuacan no doubt wanted a piece of this wealth. "Absolutely one of the vital trade commodities sought after by Teotihuacan was cacao," says Mayan hieroglyphic scholar John Montgomery, whose book Tikal describes this ancient Maya capital. "The Maya area was a cacao breadbasket." 

This seemingly magical tree sprouted fruit directly from its trunk and, unlike corn, squash, and other local crops, would not grow outside of the shady, dank forest. The tree's gooey fruit, once freed from its waxy football-shaped pod, could be fermented into a sweet and tangy wine still drunk in parts of the Yucatan today. And its almond-like seeds, when dried and ground into a sticky, nearly black paste, served as the base of a stimulating and fulfilling drink similar to modern-day coffee.

Served cold or as chacau haa, hot chocolate, this was the basic cacao beverage—the espresso equivalent of an Americano. To it they added a variety of flavorings: hot chili or vanilla, allspice and, occasionally, honey. They stirred in cooked corn to make a gruel called saca, or added other seeds to prepare another drink, tzune, for special occasions.

To prepare the drink, they mixed the paste and other ingredients with water, then repeatedly poured the rich liquid from one vessel held at waist height into another set on the floor. The pouring produced a silky head of foam, something like whipped cream, on the beverage—the most coveted part of the drink.

But to the Maya, cacao was far more than just a beverage. "I think everything that was important to the Maya involved cacao,” says Coe, who has been literally piecing together Mesoamerican life from shards of pottery and other archaeological clues for more than four decades. "It was absolutely, supremely important to them."

The tree, its beans, and the beverages made from them turned up in art, religious ritual, and social tradition. They accompanied gods on elaborate scenes carved into stone monuments and painted on pottery. Priests baptized children with a special holy water containing flowers and ground cacao. Betrothed couples exchanged public vows, along with grains of cacao, to seal their commitment to each other, while the brides of kings presented their royal husbands with special vessels of quality chocolate topped with plenty of foam.

They even buried chocolate with the dead. Maya elite were entombed dressed in the finest robes and jewelry and surrounded by talismans, status symbols, and other valuables. Chocolate was almost always a part of the mix.

In one particularly revealing example, a royal tomb in northeastern Guatemala was found to contain, among other items, seven cylindrical containers, including a pot with an extravagant stirrup handle and screw-on lid. Set atop a short pedestal, the celebrated piece was painted with hieroglyphs reading, "a drinking vessel for witik cacao, for kox cacao," the undeciphered Mayan words likely denoting flavors. Laboratory analysis of its interior surface by Hershey Foods Corporation came back positive for chocolate. All seven containers likely held varieties of the cacao beverage. "There are thousands of these cylindrical vessels [excavated from tombs] in collections, and the vast majority say right on them, 'This is a vessel for chocolate,'" says Coe.

But there was one way the Maya used cacao that forever changed its course and made it, if not the most vital, certainly the most valuable edible plant of the time, even above the food staple maize. Cacao beans served as money. Although the exchange rate among the early Maya may never be known, a single bean as late as the mid-1500s bought a tamale, tomato, or avocado, while three purchased a fish wrapped in corn husks. A slave cost about 100 beans, a rabbit about ten and, in the words of Conquest chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, "there are women that give their bodies for. . .eight or ten [beans], as he and she would accord."

By using the beans as currency, the Maya lifted cacao out of the symbolic realm and planted it squarely into the reality of the day. By the late fourth century ad, the promise of cacao had spread far beyond Mayan boundaries. It had become "like Middle Eastern oil," Coe says. "This stuff led to entire wars."

Indeed, there can be little doubt that gaining control of this commodity, if not the sole reason, was a primary objective of Teotihuacan when it invaded the Maya capital of Tikal in 379 AD, killed the king, and installed one of its own on the throne. The hostile takeover sealed their domination over every source of wealth in Mesoamerica. Teotihuacan would remain an economic superpower until about 600 ad, when barbarians from northern Mexico captured, sacked, and thoroughly destroyed the city, reducing it to rubble.

Though the Maya, the first true chocolate connoisseurs, may have taken cacao from the odd pod on a strange tree and elevated it to a social and economic linchpin, they, like the Aztecs, appear to have inherited the drink.

"The word kakaw is not Mayan," says Coe, who is convinced that chocolate was invented by the premier civilization of the Americas, the Olmec. These peoples thrived where cacao grew. They spoke an ancestral form of a family of languages called Mixe-Zoquean. Linguists agree that the origin of the word kakaw lies in a pre-Mixe-Zoquean tongue. Further, the term first turns up around 1000 BC at the height of the Olmec empire.

Whether it was the Olmec or some other Mixe-Zoquean-speaking peoples who first enjoyed cacao is unknown, but if the Maya hadn't embraced it so wholeheartedly, it's doubtful cacao would have caught the attention of contemporaneous cultures.

"The Maya were like the Greeks in that they were ahead of everybody else," says Coe. "Their standards became everybody's standards. So if they drank cacao, everybody else would want to do it."

Luckily for us, after centuries of cultural mixing among Mesoamericans through trade and takeover, cacao was here to stay, even if the Maya weren't. A combination of overpopulation, environmental degradation, and too much war led to their collapse, and by 900 ad the Maya had abandoned their great cities to the rainforests, scattering in all directions. Other great civilizations, such as the Toltecs, would bud into relatively short-lived superpowers, but by 1200 AD, Mesoamerica had become a handful of equally powerless, fallen empires.

Into this volatile environment stepped the Aztecs. Little more than a nomadic tribe of ruffians clothed in animal hides and hunting with bows and arrows, the first Aztecs wandered into the Valle de Mexico in the early 1300s, seeking out a land promised in an ancient myth. They stumbled upon the descendants of the once-great Toltecs and the good life—advanced agriculture, skilled craftsmen, well-established trade routes and, of course, cacao.

Unfortunately for the newly arrived Aztecs, they were integrated into society as little better than slaves, until their belligerent ways got them banished to a patch of islands in the expansive Lake of the Moon, which filled most of the Valle de México.

A resourceful people, they flourished on these islands, creating the beginnings of the historic capital of Tenochtitlán, today's Mexico City. Within the space of a single lifetime, the Aztecs conquered those who were once their overlords, fully absorbed their subjects' more sophisticated ways, and elected their first king. Backed by huge unstoppable armies, they gained control over most of Mesoamerica within an equally brief period, and before long had evolved into one of the most organized, disciplined, and—with an estimated 10 to 11 million people in the valley alone from which to exact tribute—wealthiest civilizations the Americas had ever seen.

Although they demanded from conquered regions everything from jaguar hides to gold, cacao beans and drinking vessels were at the top of the list. According to their own accounting records, Aztec rulers required several million beans a year to provide enough of the drink for themselves and their courts as well as to pay the salaries of employees.

Motecuhzoma II, the emperor at the time of the Conquest better known today as Montezuma, had a warehouse dedicated exclusively to cacao which may have contained up to a billion beans at any one time—a stock he appears to have needed. He purportedly ordered 2,000 servings of chocolate, with foam,daily for his personal soldier-bodyguards alone. He offered visiting nobility and priests chocolate of the highest grade, spiced with exceptional flavors—a hint of rose, or the bouquet of almonds. And meetings with other leaders were invariably conducted over cacao, where the dignitaries drank from elaboratedly decorated gourds and stirred their beverage with tortoiseshell spoons.

Motecuhzoma II recognized cacao as a stimulant. He shrewdly fortified his armies with sufficient rations of ground cacao to complement more basic fare such as toasted corn tortillas, tamales, and beans. Alas, even with chocolate, the Aztec army could not fend off the smallpox, measles, and waves of rebelling indigenous enemies that accompanied the Spanish conquistadores. By 1521, the Aztec empire was on its knees. The Aztecs were again enslaved, this time to the Spaniards.

The Europeans thought everything about the Aztecs barbaric, even their prestigious chocolate. According to one historian, "It seemed more a drink for pigs, than a drink for humanity." Another one told how "It disgusts those who are not used to it, for it has a foam on top, or a scum-like bubbling."

Even more disturbing, the Aztecs often added to these beverages a popular seasoning called achiote, which stained their lips and tongues blood-red. The effect was intentional. Chocolate had come to symbolize blood, a precious liquid from a pod about the size of the human hearts they extracted on a nearly daily basis.

The Aztecs believed that humankind was experiencing its fifth time around, its Fifth Sun. All previous worlds had been destroyed at the whim of unsatisfied gods. This Sun would ultimately follow this fate. But, in the meantime, one way to keep the sun rising each day was to offer their many deities human flesh and blood.

And so during the annual ceremony honoring Quetzalcóatl, the slave warrior would complete his cacao-fueled dance and then submit himself for sacrifice. The priests would swiftly extract his heart, and lift toward the heavens a gift of the highest grade: human flesh, bathed in blood spiked with that other precious liquid, chocolate.

Dave Brian Butvill is a writer and editor. His website is www.internationaledit.com.