The Aztecs

Want to walk the halls of Ambulance childhood home or explore the castles that made up Henry the 8th English Stronghold? With a subscription to History Hit you can dive into our Tudor past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week, covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe. In 1519, 10 years after Henry the 8th became King of England. A small group of Spanish conquistadors, led by Hernando Cortez, came across a sophisticated civilization more than 5,000 miles away from Europe in what is now Mexico. Within two years, the Aztec Empire had been all but destroyed. But its complex culture still fascinates us today. They use a ritual sacrifice, their beliefs about the afterlife, and perhaps surprisingly, their advanced attitudes to gender roles, including a schooling for both boys and girls. I'm Professor Cizana Lipscomb, and in this edition of Not Just the Tudors, I'm delving deep into the world of the Aztecs with Dr Caroline Dodd's penic to discover an extraordinary society and its differences and similarities to its European invaders. Caroline and I have long been Twitter buddies and we've even recently collaborated on a book, but this is the first time we've had an actual, it's not quite in real life, but in real time, conversation, and Caroline is Senior Lecturer in International History at the University of Sheffield. She's the author of Bonds of Blood, Gender, Life, Cycle and Sacrifice in Aztec Culture, and if you enjoy our conversation, which I'm sure you will, you must rush out and buy it because not only do I think it's brilliant, very well written, really fascinating stuff, but also it won the Royal Historical Society Gladstone Pride. And she's currently writing a book that we eagerly awaiting, which is on early Indigenous travellers to Europe entitled On Savid Shores, The American Discovery of Europe. So hopefully we'll talk about that in the future, but it's the Aztecs we're talking about today. So, Caroline, can we start by talking about our non-manclature, Aztecs or Mexico or other words that we use? What's correct? What should we be for you saying? That's a good place to start. Thank you for the kind introduction. The book is quite old now, but the starting point for the book, so it makes sense for the starting point for the conversation, is what we call these people, because we've come to know them as Aztecs, but that's actually a term which is really invented in the 18th century. It comes from their origins in a place called Azclan. A guy called Clavihero starts calling them the Aztecs and it sticks, and that's how they've come down to us. But in reality, they would have called themselves either the Mishika, the people of Mexico, so, spelt the same as Mexico, but with an A on the end. Or Mishika Chichimeca, which sort of evokes their origins as people of Mexico, but also people of the Chichimecs, or a warrior nomadic people, or else they'd have called themselves by the name of their city, so they might well have called themselves the Tenoka, the people of Tenosh Titlan, or Tlateloka if they're from there, and so on. So what should we say today? I think we should probably stick with Aztecs simply because that's what people recognize. And the difficulty is that if you talk about things people don't understand, then they tend to switch off, I think, so I'm sure some of my colleagues would disagree with me, but I tend to use Aztecs, but caveat it, you know, and say, but that's probably not what they would have called themselves. The famous Aztec Nahua translator, one for scholar Miguel León Portilla, he was asked what to call it, and he started calling them the Azteca Mishika, so he sort of stuck both together, but I think we could probably stick with Aztecs and we'll be all right. And we have the same for the tutors. I mean, they wouldn't have called themselves the tutors, and we, of course, we all use that all the time. It would have been kind of an embarrassment for the Henry VII to be referred to as Henry Tudor. And I suppose the other thing to think about is what period we're talking about. We're going to hopefully go on and talk about what we know of Aztec culture, or some of it at least. And I suppose in some ways, what period we're talking about is slightly hazy because of the sort of sources we're using. It's kind of like when we see a star, we're seeing something that was 1500 years ago, whatever how many years in the past. And in some ways, the picture we have of the Aztecs is kind of a glimpse of a collapsing culture, is that right? I think I would personally be a little bit careful with the word collapsing, just because it implies that they're imploding in some ways in their own right, or off their own backs, where in fact what happens is that we get a huge Spanish invasion in 1519, and their dominance in Mexico is brought to a rather abrupt end. But millions of their descendants still live in Mexico today. So I'm always a little bit cautious of saying that they were obliterated or collapsed and so on, because there's so much that continues. That said, coming back to where you really started, what you wanted to talk about, which is sources, we do have this incredible difficulty with sources, because apart from archaeology and a few pictographic documents, we have absolutely nothing from before the Spanish invasion. The Aztecs are a literate culture. They use pictographic texts to record huge amounts of information, religious, administrative, legal records. But then when the Spanish arrive, after the conquest, they destroy all the records, because they're worried that they might be corrupting, that their religious documents, they don't really understand it. And they then realise they've made a mistake and start asking for some of those documents to be recreated. Some of the indigenous people recreate documents or write in their traditional pictographic form after the conquest. But for an awful lot of our information, we're dependent on texts produced by Spaniards, or a little bit later, Mistizo and Nahua writers looking back at the Aztec Empire. So what you have are all these documents that are produced either under the Aegis of the Spanish, or in collaboration with the Spanish, or by Europeans themselves, or by indigenous people who've been influenced by living in the colonial world. So everything that you're using is filtered by this lens of being in the colonial world and working with Spaniards. Now, whackle, the Aztec language, isn't an alphabetic text until after the Spanish arrive. So even things written in Nahuaatl, we're reliant in translating them on dictionaries written by Spaniards who didn't know what Nahuaatl meant. And so the meanings of the words often slip between our understanding of them and the original. The most famous example is probably the word "tlatch sorely", which for a long time was translated as the word "sin". That's how it appears in the earliest Spanish Nahuaatl dictionaries, "sin" and "picado", but really it means something like dirt or stuff out of place or filth. And so what you have there is a concept which is actually something which is necessary, but you can't have too much of in the Aztec worldview, and then when you take it through the Spanish and through the translation, you get the idea of "sin" and "evil", which is not how the Aztecs would have seen it at all. So even the language is really, really complicated. So everything that we have is really speculative because we're always trying to strip away the layers and get back to the way that the Aztecs would have seen things. That's really fascinating because those two ideas are very, very different, aren't they? And they completely colour. I mean, of course you can see that you've got Spanish clerics or whatever leading the charge with producing these sources. They're going to be looking for sin, but actually this idea of dirt, necessary dirt, is a really profoundly different cultural shift. But try to discover those things. I can imagine that's a real challenge. The sources you're working on, you're working in Spanish and what had to, is that right? Yeah, I worked in Spanish. I've worked in Spanish. And now, "Wattle Sources". And I use pictography and archaeology, though I tend to rely on my expert colleagues' interpretation of those as a starting point. I wouldn't claim to be an art historian or an archaeologist. But my starting point was with the alphabetic texts, and when I started doing that, which was actually quite a long time ago, it was actually quite an unfashionable thing to do, because people had got the idea quite rightly that in many ways these texts reflect the context in which they were produced and their authors more than they do their subjects. So after the flowering of post-colonialism, post-modernism, those sorts of things, people said, "We can't possibly use these texts because all we're seeing is Spanish preconceptions." And I started working on them because I was working in Oxford and I didn't know you weren't supposed to because there weren't any Aztecists in Oxford at that time. They were all in America. And if I'd been in America, I would probably be a much better Nahuatlato than I am, much better reader of Nahuatl. But I would almost certainly have been working on the colonial period when we have all these mundane, by which I mean, everyday texts that are genuinely Nahuá, views of themselves. Nahuá is what we call Aztec people after the conquest when it's all Nahuatl speaking people's after the conquest and they become harder to disentangle that you do still have groups. So these Nahuá texts, sorry, from after the conquest, and they were at the time I was starting to research huge as a subject of study by J. James Lockhart started a whole school called the Lockhart School. And he and his PhD students, and his PhD students students, all have done amazing work on these texts. But because I was working in Oxford with an Italianist as a supervisor, as a historian, you go, "Oh, well, I'll have a look at the text." And it was only later that I realized that what I was doing actually had become a bit unfashionable. I think people are going back to the texts now and certainly using them to supplement other things. But for a long time, they weren't the starting point, understandably. But they are very rich, just really problematic. That's what I wanted to ask you. What is in them, all sources that we're working with on this period, are problematic in different ways, especially when we're trying to get to ordinary people's lives or culture and gender and all these fascinating things. But the sources judging by your book do provide huge amounts of information, nevertheless. So how have you managed to get at that, really? How are they structured? What can you find in them and tell me about the sources? So you have several different kinds of sources. In particular, I would say four sorts of sources you have. Sources that are recorded or all traditions, whether composed before or after the conquest is something a bit hard to tell, but sources that come down from your tradition, like the Cantare's songs. And also speeches. We have these amazing hui hui te toli speeches or words of the elders, which are given at important moments in Aztec lives. These are wrote learned discourses, which so it's incredible to be able to access those moments, even if they're a bit static. You have conquisted all sources, who of course are really problematic, but are eye witnesses to at least what things look like and what's happening at the moment they arrive. You have missionary records, most famously the Florentine codecs by Bernardino Sarhagun, but there are others. And these are men who realize that in order to convert Aztec culture, they're going to need to understand it. So with the aid of indigenous collaborators, they collect huge amounts of information. The Florentine codecs is 12 books of ethnographic information. Bernardino Sarhagun has been called the first anthropologist, but actually now we're starting to know the names of his indigenous collaborators better, things like that. And then finally, towards the end of the 16th century, you have what's called the gold age of Nahuatl when Nahuatl and Mistizo writers write texts of their own histories and start to record their own histories. You have a few earlier that are anonymous, that are Nahuatl writings. So you have to take all these sources and try and sift them for things that don't look likely to have been imposed by the Spanish. So one of the things that was most compelling for me working on gender was that the picture that came out of the sources about gender as being something quite balanced and complimentary isn't something I can imagine the Spanish inventing. It's neither very negative nor very positive. You have to always be really alert for Spanish interventions in terms of the language or the framing, or their deliberate interventions. A man called Diego Durán, who was very sympathetic to the Spanish. He was a Dominican friar. He wrote several big histories and he thought the Aztecs were one of the great civilizations of the world. But in recording their histories like a big, dynastic European history, he created a linear royal history almost where they would have seen it as a cyclical, spiritual history which happened within a religious context and within a cyclical repeating context. He blurs all that out and he's only interested in kings and rulers and wars and those sorts of things. So just because they're serious about their recording and trying to it faithfully, that doesn't always mean they get it right even and you can lose things in it. And so I guess what I just do is to sift really, really carefully and read really closely. I do a lot of close reading, a lot of close analysis. When I did the book, one of my editors said, could you articulate your theory more explicitly and play down the sources a little bit? You've got a bit too much in the way of sources. And I remember saying, but my theoretical background is the sources. That's where I start. I don't know where else to start with it. But they are so rich and so fascinating and there's so much there, but it is problematic because firstly it's nearly all from men, the informants and the writers and nearly all men. For example, I'm pretty sure the Aztecs would have been obsessed with men's situation because blood is a huge thing in their culture, but we don't know anything about menstruation. Nothing at all because it wouldn't occur to friars to ask and it wouldn't occur to men who were educated in the noble school to talk about it. So we don't know anything about that. They're nearly all by men, they're nearly all by nobles and they tend to be idealised. So women do this, men do this, carpenters do that rather than individual stories. That is interesting about menstruation and it does make a lot of sense because actually of course the one thing that most people probably know about Aztecs is there's ritual sacrifice that there is blood taking a human sacrifice that happens. And I think it would be really interesting if we could think about the cultural complexities of that and the Aztecs and blood basically, your book, "Bonds of Blood". I mean, let's delve into that. Tell me what it's about this ritualised violence. Human sacrifice has often been somewhere that people are misled about Aztec culture. So people get this sensationalist image of ultra-violent, ultra-blood-thirsty people. But the reality is that although they do engage in ritual bloodletting, it is for quite specific purposes and it's got absolutely nothing to do with being bloodthirsty. It is to do with an agreement with the gods. So in all of these mythical histories that we have, there are sacrificial stories where the gods let blood from themselves or in some cases rip themselves in pieces or sacrifice their bodies to create the world and to create humans. And so the Aztecs believe they have to let blood in order to sustain the world, to feed the gods and to keep the sun rising. They believe the world will come to an end if they don't do that. Unlike some forms of human sacrifice, they don't gain personal advantage through it, except perhaps in as much as a warrior who got lots of captives for sacrifice might gain some status. They don't gain spiritual advantage or any sort of power to the person by committing sacrifice. Where some forms of ritualised sacrifice, it's all about you gaining power from the person you're killing. It's not like that. It's about feeding the gods. And they're not really interested in pain either. There are painful rituals but suffering, again unlike some forms of sacrifice, doesn't play any part. It's all about blood and hearts and feeding the gods. And it's a really sophisticated society with so many things that we would find familiar and comprehensible. And so it can be really problematic that people just only see the sacrifice. It's like, what's that rule where the longer you're on the internet, the more likely it is someone mentions the Nazis. It's like that with the Aztecs. The longer you talk about them, the more likely it is someone mentioned the Nazis or compare them to the Nazis. And it is a difficult world view to imagine yourself into in some ways. What I find most interesting is that they are a society where they go to considerable lengths to make sure people understand why they're doing what they're doing. This is a culture, the only one I know of before the modern world, though maybe you know of another one where they have universal education for boys and girls. And the reason for doing that I think is to ensure that everyone understands what sacrifice is for. They don't think this is an easy thing to do. So they learn rhetoric and philosophy and religion and logic, all sorts of stuff in the evenings when they're teenagers. There's other education as well but everyone does that. And they don't find this easy. It's not a straightforward thing. There's no sense that you just kill people and it's meaningless. Morning is a huge thing in Aztec culture. They believe that you go to a privileged afterlife if you die in sacrifice. It's idealized as the best kind of death. And actually, and as far as I know, the only person who's looked at this, there are these speeches given to young men when they go off to trainers priests and it's all about isolating yourself from your home. So they're very family orientated, the Aztecs. And this is all, the family is no longer for you. You must not look back to your home. You are a priest now, do not think of us. And the training is very like military training almost. We have to do lots of rituals very correctly with no sleep and under difficult circumstances. And it is quite clearly about training people to do difficult things. To perform an act that would feel alien to most humans, to just sort of rip people's heart out. There's no sense that an everyday person could go and do that. It's a special role and you're trained, especially for it. So from what you're saying is, there's no pleasure taking in doing this. It is a sacrifice, obviously, it's a great sacrifice on the part of the victim, but it's a sacrifice also on the part of the priest who's having to perform this difficult task, which is necessary for the continuation of life. I think so. I certainly think that the training of the priests implies that it is seen as being a difficult job, that it's seen as something you need special training to be capable of committing. That said, I think by the time you are an experienced priest, it probably does become a ritual act, something you just do regularly. I'm not saying that as a priest's agonise over the fate of their victims, because they believe those people are going to a privileged afterlife. The closest parallel, I think, is to martyr them. They believe you die for the gods and you gain a privileged afterlife as a result. The Aztecs don't think what you do in life affects your afterlife. It's only how you die that affects your afterlife. So there are only a few ways to avoid going to Mictlán, which is the land of the dead, which is a kind of dark, low-grade suffering, not hell, but not very nice. and only a few ways to avoid that one of which is dying in battle or dying as a sacrifice. So Aztec warriors are supposed to idealise going and being sacrificed in other cities, just as they are sacrificing people here. That said, I think people probably do celebrate the sacrifices. It would be wrong to say that these aren't big festivals and festivities with drunkenness and dancing, shouting, they spread blood through the city in a kind of spreading of the charisma and a bringing of the battlefield into the city and people are carried away by all the energy and the emotion. These are great events. It's not happening in an atmosphere of mourning, but it's about praising the sun, praising the gods, bringing glory to the city as well. So the more sacrifices there are, the more powerful it means your gods are, the more powerful your city is, but it isn't as straightforward as these people are violent because there's very little interpersonal violence so far as we can see in the city. You can't beat your wife, you can't just go around stabbing people in streets. In a world where swords were sharp. And hygiene was actually probably better than you think it is. Two fearless historians. Me, Matt Lewis. And me, Dr. Alan Arionaga, dive headfirst into the mud, blood and very strange customs of the Middle Ages. So for plagues, crusades and Viking raids and plenty of other things that don't rhyme, subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. So we've got a warrior culture and that violence is from what you're saying very much plowed into the doing of war and sacrificing as opposed to being a violent culture per se. I suppose what might be helpful is to get a sense of what happens at a sacrifice. We're talking about it broadly but there are different ways of sort of normal typical ritual of sacrifice and then maybe think about festivals as well so that we have a real sense of that before going into a bit more about what that means in terms of their culture. Yes, there are a lot of different kinds of sacrifice. I suppose two main types of victims, people who are sacrificed as what are called as "shiptler", like impersonators of the gods. People who dress as the god that a ceremony is intended to honour and are then sacrificed. And then sacrifices are people who are either described as men, women, children or just victims. And you have the annual round of sacrifices at which there are a "shiptler" impersonators. Each month or we call them months but they're actually 20 days, each 20 day, maintain a month, has specific rituals designed for that time of the year. So you have harvest festivals, you have festivals that relate to the warfare season and so on and so forth. And then in amongst that you have sacrifices that are of large numbers of people say to dedicate a temple or whatever it is. Now an average sacrifice would involve a captive being taken to the top of the temple being stretched backwards over an altar. When you think of an altar, you think of a big kind of table. This is actually more like a pointy plinth so it sticks into your back so you can be bent backwards over it. And a priest holds each arm and leg, so for priest holding the arms and legs and another person takes the heart out through the chest. Most of those sacrifices take place on the temple of my or the great temple at the heart of Tenerife Tchitlan and after the sacrifice the body is thrown down the steps. And the fascinating thing about this is that this mirrors a story in Aztec mythology where Whitsloposhtli, the tribal god of the Aztecs, their patron god God of the Sun, he defeats his sister, Koyl Zhaoqi, who is challenging his authority and then he throws her down the mountain and she falls breaking in pieces. And at the bottom of the temple of my or you have a big relief, a big sculpture of Koyl Zhaoqi, of the sister and the bodies are literally being thrown from the temple which symbolises the mountain and falling next to the sculpture of Koyl Zhaoqi as her and then they decapitate them, put the heads on a skull rack and just like she was dismembered. So you have this replaying of mythology all the time happening in the center of the city and they would have been very aware of that, that this is a rewriting of the past that's going on over and over. So that's a kind of average sacrifice, you have gladiatorial sacrifices, warrior ones where they try and cut them until they fall and then they drag them off to take the heart out. And those are an opportunity actually for warriors from other cities to demonstrate their bravery before they die. It's a gladiatorial about masculinity and warrior prowess. And then you have sacrifices which take place in other places which are again part of mythical stories. And one particularly interesting one is that there are only women who are sacrificed by decapitation. So where decapitation is the cause of death. And that relates to their position as impersonators of the nature god and being particularly powerful. It's a whole fascinating history where you have women playing a particular role in the mythology and so they get sacrificed in a special way. There's a real intimacy to some of these sacrifices. One in particular you hear an account of a kind of average sacrifice. And what happens is that the warrior after you capture or captive he lives in your district and you care for him until the time of his sacrifice. The warrior then takes him to the temple himself, watch his the sacrifice and then after he's thrown down the steps he takes the body home, less the best piece which goes to the emperor, usually the thigh apparently that's the tastiest bit. And that body of the captive is then consumed in ceremonial cannibalism by the warrior's family and friends. But he doesn't join in. He stands apart and he wears white and is painted in white. And it's a reminder of two things. One that this is also supposed to be his fate. He could die as a captive. And it's also a mark of honor to the captive who's died. Because before he goes to the temple they have this little ceremony where the captive says you are as my beloved father and the warrior says you are my beloved son and they become entangled. Their honor and their privilege and their lives are entangled from that point, ritually. And so a captive going to a good death that reflects on the warrior himself. There's so much in there about honor and about warrior masculinity and the way that they are supposed to idealise this as a death for themselves. Yes, it does give a very different perspective on it, doesn't it? When you think about the fact that they're watching this possibly repeatedly if they have many captives and knowing that this is how they themselves should hope to die because although we don't have by definition the perspective of those who die in this way about what they feel about their death that does at least give you some sense of how they should have thought about their death according to Aztec culture I suppose. Absolutely, and honor. We can be certain that some people did think about it in this way and other people did not think about it in this way. The evidence we have suggests that some people did go to a good death exalting their city with their heads held high and other people were dragged kicking and screaming. It's one thing to idealise dying a particular way and another thing to actually go through with it and that's certainly what I'm sure would have happened in Aztec culture just as anywhere else. Let's think a little bit more about women. So you said that it's only women who are decapitated but also the fascinating idea I had never come across before I read it in your book is about how women in childbirth are kind of aping warriors. Could you talk to us about that? Yeah, it is really really fascinating. It's so much the case that mothers are paralleled with warriors in Aztec culture and part of this is about creating a warrior society where everyone sees themselves as a warrior. So you are part of the warrior effort whether you go to the battlefield or not and women are regarded in childbirth as parallel to warriors both in the action of it so they talk about them capturing a baby and bearing the small shields into childbirth and all of this sort of thing and in what happens afterwards if you die in childbirth. So women who die in childbirth are paralleled with men who die in battle. What happens is that you have four years accompanying the sun, your spirit. So men spirits carry the sun from its rising to its zenith, the highest point, leading heralding this great god to its peak and the women carry it from the peak to the setting which seems pretty straightforwardly parallel, right? But there's slight difference already appearing in their roles because men get the glorious rejoicing and women get this awful responsibility because they have to hand the sun into the hands of the land of the dead which is underneath the earth and they believe that the sun has to fight through the mid-lan, the land of the dead to rise again in the morning. But it is very clearly a parallel and then four years after that. like a promotion plan, men go off to become hummingbirds and butterflies that dance in the sun and sip the nectar and live drunk is how they talk about it. Something which Inca Clandin said she never understood how these great warriors could have been seen as butterflies until she went to Mexico and she saw the big clouds of butterflies and it was just like people were whirling and dancing with the feathers and so on. Now women get a rather different afterlife. The spirits of women who die in childbirth go off to become the seawater here, women gods who live at the crossroads and vest ill will on people on days of ceremonial ill fortune and it's believed that at the end of time from these women will arise the tsimi meh, a word usually translated as devil women who will devour humanity. Now this isn't a very pleasant afterlife but he is a lot more than quite like being a hummingbird. It's not as if you don't get the perpetual drunkiness and oblivion and all this stuff but it's really important. These women are being given far more power than the men and this is to do with women's connection to the earth through childbirth. They're believed that while they're giving birth, Syawako actle one of the aspects of the earth goddess literally embodies them. She comes into their body so if they die during childbirth she doesn't leave their body. Her power stays in them and it's believed to be physical to the extent they have to guard her body really carefully because young warriors will try and steal bits of it to carry as talismans into battle, things like that. There's a really moving account that she's a husband sitting over the wife's body protecting it for four days until she's able to be buried. And so it's very much a parallel but then the implications are rather different and it's from this that we get ideas about gender relationships in earth, her culture. Women are really important but it doesn't always make for kind of pleasant reading. And is this gender aspect present for a baby from the moment of their birth? You said that both boys and girls are educated so that is highly unusual for this period of time but do we see in other ways that boys and girls are treated differently? Absolutely. So gender is embedded in Aztec culture from the moment of birth so they have a ceremony for all babies a few days after they're born and the little girl is given weaving patterns and a broom, markers of her gender and her umbilical cord is buried at the hearth in the home and the boy is given little weapons and sometimes craft implements and his umbilical cord is buried on a battlefield by the warriors. So already when you're a baby this is kind of marked out. Now the fascinating thing is from my point of view is a gender historian that from the time you're weaned as a baby the parent of your respective gender looks after you so boys are looked after by their fathers and girls are looked after by their mothers so you don't have women with this single burden of child care which often shapes their fortune in other cultures. And this gendered child care is to the extent that if you get divorced and divorce is allowed in Aztec culture is not encouraged but it is allowed. If you get divorced the man takes the male children and the woman takes the female children. Now I would argue that that's because gender in Aztec culture is so paralleled it's these separate spheres almost this binary organisation that they believe you have to have the young boys learning their role from the father and the girls learning the role from the mother. There have been some people who've argued that it's because gender is a fluid thing in Aztec society and so it needs fixing down through gendered upbringing. That's what some people have argued. You can argue either way the outcome is the same which is that you have this heavily gendered upbringing with men taking one path and women taking another. There are areas where they cooperate and collaborate so if we talk about in adulthood both men and women can be doctors they can be marketplace overseas which is very important because it provisions the army amongst other things that you have priests and priestesses though the role of the priestess tends to be domestic and in the temple rather that you don't have sacrificial priestesses for example. So there are a lot of later parallels all the way up to the ruler so the Clatoani is a man he is the head of the political affairs and then you have the Siwacoatl who is often forgotten about who is also a man but Siwacoatl means woman snake he personifies the goddess and he dresses as the goddess on ceremonial occasions and I would argue that that's because he takes on the domestic the internal affairs of the city role and the Clatoani the foreign public space and that you have to have a female influence even if a woman can't play that role at the highest level. Some people of course would say this is just patriarchy it's men being in charge just like always but there do seem to be distinctive differences in that women for example can inherit equally with men they do inherit equally with men you don't have pre-mogenerative here so there's not all the fuss about the eldest son power passes through male and female lines equally women hold jobs when we talk about the domestic sphere being the woman's sphere we mean literally she's in charge there she provisions the household she controls the money and everything or the goods because of course not a cash economy it's not that the man is in charge of it he kind of comes in order to her around it's a very different structure that doesn't mean that women aren't often excluded from traditional sources of power but it is a very different world and a very different experience for women than in somewhere like Europe at that time where you're pretty much oppressed by every power structure once you get married. Yes so let's have a think a bit more about married life what do we know of Aztec married life apart from the raising of the children by someone of the same assigned gender as them. So when you get married it seems to be arranged by the families but there seems to be a fair bit of consent involved in the decision probably not at the very highest levels but ordinary people you're not being forced into marriage and they have an incredible symbolic marriage in which they literally tie the knot they tie their cloaks together and the mother-in-law of the man feeds him and the woman's mother-in-law feeds her it's all a very parallel balance term and then you spend four days closeted together and my reading of this is that it's time to get to know each other actually there isn't the forcing of the man on the woman on the wedding night it is time for young people to be alone getting to know each other before they become full citizens because when you get married is the moment you're entered in the register of married men you become eligible for tribute for military service things like that and if you're rich you give some money to your community at the time you get married and if you're poor they give you resources to set up your household so it's quite a communistic society in terms of married life the woman would have spent a lot of her time grinding corn, maize, what we think of as sweet corn maize to make tortillas the household tend to be extended family households around courtyards things like that it depends on social status of course but the interesting thing is that the roles are quite similar regardless of social status you might have better food and nicer clothes if you're more important but fundamentally men go to war and they tend to do a fair bit of farming but then if you think about crafts both men and women do craftwork in those districts they are feather workers and jewel workers and jade workers mosaic artists they weave women are incredibly important in the economy because their response will both for the production of the staple food source because to grind enough corn to feed a family takes ages they must have had very early four arms these women or this grinding on the grindstone and weaving which is also quite hard work for your arms they must have very strong arms and weaving is vital because one of the staple commodities of exchange is cotton and other forms of fabric and so fundamentally the more you can weave the richer your household is so women are really important in basic production and then they might also have had jobs like being doctors or midwives but it seems to be that the woman principally takes on responsibility for the domestic roles whether man principally does things that are outside of the home so probably women are more involved in child care and reality to some extent but we see pictures of four or five year old boys going fishing with their fathers going and learning how to hunt for example because remember when I mentioned fishing this is a waterborne culture this is like American Venice really what we have are canals beside many of the streets people farming these amazing Chinampas often called floating gardens but are actually anchored to the base of the lake through trees incredibly fertile but by the end tenosh titlan has become a what they call a parasitic city it can't support itself it's so big that there's also a lot of imports of tribute and so on but you do all the same things that other people do you raise your children you farm you probably would enjoy gambling maybe watching the ballgame poetry and music and singing at every level is really well thought of anybody can be a composer male and female if you're good at it it's something where you would be really respected you can make a lot of money that's a really fascinating overview of Aztec life and I'm really struck by that parasitic I mean that would be the definition of most economies in the world today wouldn't it therefore interesting how these terms get used like my extent of use of collapsing you know and some ways they're kind of judgments on this society which actually is as you're describing it very sophisticated it is I think I think that's why we have to be. be so careful. It's not that I'm saying the Aztecs didn't commit human sacrifice. Whenever I mention the Aztecs on Twitter, some person will pop up and shout at me about how they sacrifice people and how, therefore, it was a good idea they were conquered. But in this period in Spain, people were being burnt at the stake. They were being executed for all kinds of religious crimes that autos defere pretty horrifying. You know, these are not ideal civilizations in any way. It's simply different, isn't it? And it's a different kind of belief. And so I think it's really important that we can think ourselves inside of other people's ways of doing things. And we do use these words without thinking, "Now, I've become much more aware of this in recent years. I would tend now to talk about the Spanish invasion rather than the Spanish conquest, just because it changes the tone, doesn't it?" You go from recognizing that this is sort of an illegitimate incursion rather than saying, "Oh, the conquest," which sounds sort of exciting and dramatic and positive. And it's not that we shouldn't use other kinds of words. It's simply a sensitivity to the perspective you might be creating. So the new book, "The Reason It's Cause on Savage Shores," is an inversion. It's a deliberate recognition that the Aztecs and other indigenous Americans who travel to Europe saw Europe as savage in many ways. They, in particular, were horrified by the inequities they saw in European culture. They couldn't understand why there were people with huge amounts of money and outside of their gates, people were begging for food. They just didn't understand it at all. One thing I'd like to ask you about in terms of the sort of figures I worked on for France is about the treatment of sexual, in France, it's only known as a sin. What are the sexual norms? How are people supposed to behave in this society? And is it important in Aztec society? How you behave sexually? It is important, but in a very different way to Europe, as you might expect. It is somewhere where it's very difficult because of the Spanish layering on the sources to get the indigenous perspective on what was going on. But as far as we can tell, the Aztecs are quite sex-positive. So both men and women are expected to enjoy sex. For the sake of it, the trouble is there are some sources that say sex before marriage is punished seriously. And then there are others that say, "Unless you were quite successful and the men were there with their concubines." All this sort of thing. There are several sources that suggest that you could be having sex with someone and then when the first child is born, you have to decide whether you want to marry them or not. Which seems very possible, but we can't be certain. What we do know is that within marriage, you're supposed to enjoy sex, any kind of sex. They believe that when the baby is formed, when you get pregnant, you have to keep having sex to grow the baby. But if you have too much sex beyond a certain point, the baby will come out all sticky and be too big. So given how sticky babies are, they must have thought everybody was having it away constantly. But it's important that both male and female contributions are considered significant for birth. And it's almost impossible to access same sexual activity. It seems that it was punishable by death. Other people have argued that this is a Spanish imposition, but I haven't for tenoshitlan, for the Aztec capital I've never seen any evidence that it was not a crime. But other parts of Mesoamerica there certainly were the very least ritual transvestism and same sexual activity. But for tenoshitlan, for the Aztecs, it's hard to evidence. Except you get these little snippets. They talk, for example, about how effeminate men chew chickly, which is a bit like chewing gum, and how they make that snap in the marketplace, the sound of it. And if they weren't there, then why would you get that mentioned? So we get these tiny windows that suggest there was activity going on outside of what was acceptable. It's men, in fact, they're worried about having too much sex because they think they might exhaust their clapped solid, that stuff that is needed for procreation. You need some of it for procreation. So there's an amazing story about how this man has too much sex with these old women and they drain all the life out of him basically. So if you have too much sex, your life force will be dragged away from you. Adultery is illegal and is punishable by death in every case it seems. So there are accounts of rulers having to execute their sons for adultery. So it does seem that it's followed through. And for me, I think that's to do with the fact that in Aztec society, they're very concerned to ensure social harmony. People have to be able to cooperate, to go to war. It's quite a collaborative civilization where there's a lot of effort given to reducing overt markers of hierarchy, even if they're there in some ways. So there's a lot of emphasis put on the performance of egalitarian, as even if some of it's not there, and also social cooperation and organisation. And if you go around having sex with your neighbour's wife, then that probably doesn't do much for social harmony. So sex with other people's wives is prohibited. Polygamy is permitted amongst the high elite. It's hard to tell how widespread that was outside of the very highest nobles, but we know that polygamy is one of the things the Spanish struggle to eradicate after the conquest. There's been some analysis arguing that the polygamy was actually quite good for the women in some ways because it meant they lived in these collaborative households. But I'm not sure about that. Of course, if you're expected to produce cotton, then the more women you have producing, the more profitable your household. If you're expected to serve the sexual demands of a ruler, for example, then if you are not a consenting person in that marriage, then it might not be bad if you aren't the only person involved. If the household is a female space, then having a lot of women in it isn't necessarily a bad thing. But that's the kind of extreme end of that more rational analysis. For me, I think asset culture is mostly about partnerships. Even in the polygamous relationships, they make a big deal about having one legitimate wife. Me, Matt Lewis. And me, Dr. Eleanor Yamagur, dive headfirst into the mud, blood and very strange customs of the middle ages. So for plagues, crusades, and Viking raids, and plenty of other things that don't rhyme, subscribe to Gone medieval from history hit wherever you get your podcasts. So I think it's a great idea to have a lot of fun. I think it's a great idea to have a lot of fun. That has a kind of sacral quality and also about divination and the role of that in Aztec society. Just one thing I would say about the parallels, because you're right, there are actually parallels. The one big thing for me that is different is that you don't have the sexual double standard. Women are not held to a higher standard than men. And if anything, it's men who are being told to avoid sex more than women. So that's fascinating. So that's the big difference. I find it hard to imagine the Spanish imposing an idea where women aren't held to the higher standard, which is why I think it probably is true. Drunkenness is another area where theoretically it's the same for everyone in that you're not supposed to get drunk. Nobody is supposed to get drunk at all. Drunkenness is theoretically punishable by death, although I say theoretically because that's one where it's not so clear. They do, in fact, follow through in every case. There are ritual occasions where you get drunk. There's one ceremony where there's one barrel of pulque and loads of straws and all the young men run and they grab a straw. And if you get the straw that's been pierced all the way through, you not only get to drink the whole barrel, but you have to drink the whole barrel. But most interestingly, being drunk is something you're allowed to do when you get old. If you have grandchildren, you can go around getting drunk and that's totally fine. Some people say this is honouring these people and it kind of is, but I would say that they've passed the point of usefulness for this culture actually. Once you get old, you're no longer virile enough to be a mother or a father of children, you're no longer strong enough to be a warrior. Although they do look to the elderly as sources of wisdom, this is very much a culture of youth and energy and effectiveness. But be able to get drunk is some compensation for having passed beyond usefulness, I suppose. So it would see, because drunkenness isn't seen as something that you wouldn't enjoy, it's definitely seen as something you'd enjoy drinking pulque, which is very bitter in fact a kind of cactus wine. There are some ceremonies where it's connected to being close to the gods, so you get really drunk to be close to the gods. But basically it's something old people do. Divination. Anything in particular about divination, that's kind of a big question. It is a big question. I'm just fascinated by the use of soothsayers generally. So just any tip bits you could tell us about how the Aztecs turned to try and divine the future. The Aztecs believe they lived in a cyclical world, as I've said, where history repeats itself. And where you can therefore predict the future based on the year and on the date. So they had an incredibly complicated system of what we call it soothsaying. They would have called it something closer to readers of days. And you have these very complicated specialist [BLANK_AUDIO] manuals in which you have to calculate not just which point you are in the day count, but also where you are in the year count, where you are in the month count. So they're all intersected. It's a little bit like astrology, where you have all of these different moon rising and Venus kind of stuff, where you have lots of things all come together and so you predict at a particular moment. If you had a baby, you would be expected to consult the reader of days to find out a good day to give their naming ceremony is. If you're born on a bad day, you might try and compensate by naming them on a good day, this sort of thing. And they believe that the day you're born affects your fate. So they do very much live within a culture where religious belief is part of their everyday life where the supernatural influences how they behave and think. And you often see people try and think about religion as something opposite to logic or to practicalities, but I would see the two as very much entwined. I think it's the same in Europe at the time. You're operating within a religious worldview. It makes perfect sense to do things according to religious motives. This is why I'm being really careful not to use words like superstition because it takes this stuff and we were talking about language earlier, it relegates it to the realm of things that are silly to believe in. As a poster, simply seeing it as a different structure of belief. You can go online, by the way, and look up your Aztec day name. If you Google Aztec calendar, the first one that will pop up is a site where you can put in your date of birth and it will tell you what your fate would have been based on your day and what your day name would have been. It's kind of cool. So people want to do that. That's quite fun. Well, I will certainly be doing that after this. Thank you so much. I feel like we've only scratched the surface, but what it has revealed is quite how complex and fascinating Aztec culture was and these multiple layers of meaning and of significance in everything, even in chewing gum. So thank you so much for taking us through that and really humanising a people that I think so often, as you have said, are just characterised in terms of sacrifice. Now we have a little bit more of a sense of who they were as a people. Thank you for letting me talk about it. It's nice to be able to talk about it in an extended way. It's probably way did me into more trouble than I had intended in opening up so many questions. When you talk about it only briefly, you don't have time to even open the questions. So I fear we've asked more questions than we've answered, but it was really nice. Thank you so much.