TO EAT OR TO BE EATEN: MOLE TO COOK OUR INNER AND OUTER MONSTERS. Part 1 - Pan de Muerto and Mexican Chocolate from Scratch.

Día de Muertos Food.

Humans devour each other in many ways: we lick our blood, we bite our skin, we tear our flesh, we suck our brains, we steal our organs, and we tear our hearts out. Human voracity can take many forms —fictitious, and real—, but it has only two kinds of motivations: some people eat others to preserve their lives, and some do it because they believe they are omnipotent. This seems to be a vicious cycle of our nature: to eat or to be eaten. Perhaps, if we learned to recognize our true monsters, capture them, butcher them, throw them into a cazuela, cover them in mole, roll them up in a tortilla, and devour them instead, we could then be able to renew our sense of humanity and evolve into higher conscience.

The idea of ​​eating other humans does not have the same meaning today as it did for some ancient cultures. The Mexica, for example, believed that the practice of human sacrifice was indispensable for the continuity of life; it was not perceived as an act of isolated savagery, but rather, as a symbolic and religious ritual in which the whole community participated: there was a collective intention. The physical characteristics of the sacrificed had to go in accordance with the nature of the rite; the candidates could be selected among war captives or between members of the same community, including women and children. In some ceremonies, for a few hours or several days before the execution, the victims became the deities; they were dressed, feed, indulged, and worshiped, as such.

The role of the god had to be well represented; attitude was as important as physical appearance. In the celebration of Quetzalcóatl (Neyòlo Maxilt Ileztli), for example, the joy of the sacrificed was taken into account, since it had a premonitory quality as anthropologist James Frazer reproduces (without citing the author) in The Golden Bough (1890):

Forty days before the festival the merchants bought a slave well proportioned, without any fault or blemish, either of sickness or of hurt, whom they did attire with the ornaments of the idol, that he might represent it […] When he went through the city, he went dancing and singing through all the streets, that he might be known for the resemblance of their god, and when he began to sing, the women and little children came forth of their houses to salute him, and to offer unto him as to their god […] they took very careful heed whether he were sad, or if he danced as joyfully as he was accustomed, the which if he did not as cheerfully as they desired, they made a foolish superstition in this manner.[1]

On the other hand, the cry of children played a decisive role in the offerings for Tláloc, the god of rain, as Fray Bernardino de Sahagún points out:

[…] Before they were taken to kill, they dressed them with precious stones, and with rich feathers and with very curious and carved blankets and maxtles [loincloths], and put paper wings on them like angels […] And wherever they took them all the people were crying […] And when the children arrived at the places where they were going to be killed, if they were crying and shed a lot of tears, those who saw them crying were glad because they said it was a sign that it would rain very quickly.[2]

The absence of cry meant drought, the drought meant famine and famine was a threat to the entire community: a few were sacrificed for the good of all. When the time came, as Bishop Diego de Landa describes (about a rite of heart extraction in the Mayan world, where the practices were similar):

[…] the sayón nacón [the executioner] came with a stone knife and gave him with great skill and cruelty [the bold types are mine; they highlight value judgments that respond to the author's worldview] a stab between the ribs, on the left side, under the nipple and then went there with his hand and threw his hand into the heart like a rabid tiger tearing it alive, and then put on a plate he gave it to the priest who in a hurry smeared the idols on their faces with that fresh blood.[3]

The sacrificed body had a nutritional function: the blood and hearts were offered to the gods (the blood meant energy and the hearts were considered seeds of life), the flesh was consumed by humans (at least in some cases; although there is archaeological evidence about anthropophagy[4], it is not yet clear how often it was practiced), and the bones returned to the earth and became minerals; thanks to this, the gods kept the universe moving, mortals were able to commune with the divinity (as Catholics do with "the body and blood of Christ"), and the nutrients of bones fed Mother Earth: it was all part of a regenerative cycle.

The sacrifices were also, as noted by the Mexican archaeologist Alfonso Caso in the 1950s, an act of "reciprocity between gods and human beings."[5] In the creation myth of the Mexica, Quetzalcóatl went down to Mictlán (the underworld) with his cosmic twin, Xolótl, to get the bones of a woman and a man who had died in the previous ages. When he came back to earth carrying the bones all broken because the god of death made him drop them, he gave them to Chihuacóatl (the goddess of the earth) and she pulverized them; then, with the blood of his penis, Quetzalcóatl watered them. That is how the new generations were born. In a nutshell, Quetzalcóatl died and rose again to give life to humanity who, therefore, had to reciprocate him with sacrifice (doesn't this sound familiar?). About the celebration in honor of Quetzalcóatl, Frazer continues:

[…] The day of the feast being come, after they had done him much honour, sung, and given him incense, the sacrificers took him about midnight and did sacrifice him, as hath been said, offering his heart unto the Moon, the which they did afterward cast against the idol, letting the body fall to the bottom of the stairs of the temple, where such as had offered him took him up, which were the merchants, whose feast it was. Then having carried him into the chiefest man's house amongst them, the body was drest with diverse sauces [this is one of the few passages which mentions human flesh being cooked and served; evidently, the sauces to which they refer to are chilmollis or moles —as we know them today— which, by then, were already prepared with varied ingredients such as different types of chile, tomatoes, fruits, pumpkin seeds, corn dough, epazote and, hoja santa], to celebrate (at the break of day) the banquet and dinner of the feast […].[6]