Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Sex in the Aztec Empire

Episode Date: April 19, 2024

The Aztec Empire might conjure up images of human sacrifice.And whilst religious violence was part of their society, theirs was also a very egalitarian society where pleasure was valued and sexuality was an unashamed part of every day life.How was queerness perceived and represented in this period? What sexual freedoms did they enjoy? And what part did the Goddess of Filth play in their lives?!Joining Kate today is Caroline Pennock, author of Bonds of Blood: Gender, Lifecycle and Sacrifice in Aztec Culture. Her new book, On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe, is out now.This podcast was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code BETWIXT sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. You are listening to Betwicks the Sheeds once again, and I'm so glad that you are. But before you can continue listening, I have to make sure that you're safe, I'm safe,

the lawyers are safe, and let you know that this is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about salty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subject that you should be an adult too. If you could possibly follow, along, wherever it is that you get your podcasts, hit the subscribe button, that really would be doing

us a tremendous favour. Thank you so much, lovely, for Twixters. Excellent stuff. Right, on with the show! Don't get me wrong, but Twixters. Whilst I love being known as Dr. Kate Lister, part of me is quite jealous of Plazol Teuttle, known in the Aztec world as the goddess of filth. Seriously, imagine that on your business card. Kate Lister, goddess of filth. Filth goddess. But the Spanish, who colonised the Aztecs, translated that word to mean sin, when it actually means dirt or trash or filth. And there's still a lot of debate today about what the best translation of that word actually is. I quite like filth, though. And the Aztecs seem to know that a good life requires a bit of filth. And if your filth is listening to betwixt, then hey, what can I say? We're

doing the Lord's work. Those Aztecs are you. were onto something, I think. Now if you're all ready to kneel at the altar of the goddess of filth with me, let's get on with the show. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my voice needs by just turning a knob and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.

Goodness, my beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry. Hello and welcome back to betwixtor sheet, the history of sex scandal. society with me, Kate Lister. Preconceptions are always a tricky thing to sidestep when looking back at different times in history. You know that. And this is particularly true with the Aztec Age, which has been mostly represented to us, to the, how do I put this, a rather prudish, Catholic lens of the 16th century Spanish conquistadors and colonialists. And you've got to admit, oh, there's something of a bias there.

We also have a listener to thank for this particular request. Over to you, to you, Nick. Hi, Kate. My name is Nick and I am from New Hampshire in the U.S. I love betwixt the sheets. I never miss an episode. I love listening to you talk about all the naughty bits of history.

I wanted to ask, what can we find out about Aztec sexuality? I love Mesoamerican culture, but there always seems to be this whole when it comes to learning about sexuality and sexual practices of the Mesoamericas. I would really appreciate it.

Thank you. Have a great day. You've come to the right place, Nick, as we will find out with today's guest, Caroline Penick, author of Bonds of Blood. The Aztec world had a fascinating and very misunderstood, often surprising, take on sexuality. How were what we now think of as queer sexualities presented, understood, lived? What sexual freedoms were enjoyed in Aztec society? And how did they think of sex work? I am ready to find out if you are. And welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Caroline Penneck. How are you doing?

Well, I've got that, you know, 100-day cough, but other than that, I'm fine. So I'm just aiming for that. Is it ASMR kind of low voice today? It's kind of husky and gravelly. I'm into it. I don't know what your normal voice sounds like. So I'm not, I'm kind of like in there. That's squeaky, but I am usually slightly higher up than this. Well, I'm so grateful for you powering through and coming to talk to us because your, you're, area of expertise and research, Aztec culture, is absolutely unbelievably fascinating. And it's something that I don't know a lot about. So I've got so many questions that I want to ask you. And I suppose the first one, why the Aztecs? Do you remember what your historian origin story was with this? Was there a moment when you were just like, oh, they're very interesting. I want to know more.

Well, that is kind of my origin story. It's a very boring origin story, which is that I was really interested in history when I was young. And the more I learned about the Aztecs, the more interested I was because they're so different to the popular stereotype about them. So frequently we see them as this bloodthirsty sacrificial culture. But actually, there are a society that loves flowers and poetry. And yes, they do commit religious violence, but so do many societies in history. And they are a culture where they have relative gender egalitarianism, which I guess we're going to get into, universal education. And also people think of them as an ancient culture, I think. They pigeonhole them with things like the Egyptians and the Romans in their mind, but actually they're

contemporaries of people like Henry the 8th. And I just don't think people put them in that mental box. And so I was super fascinated by the time I went to university. I was just really, really interested and wanted to know more. They do have a lot of stereotypes, don't they? Because when I saw that I was going to be interviewing you, I've got the first thing that came it was human sacrifice. Hang on, what was that? Where did that come from? And where does that come from? That stereotype of these people as violent, bloodthirsty, sacrificial maniacs? It's really interesting because they do commit human sacrifice, but then so do many cultures throughout the globe, throughout history. If you add religious violence to that number, then we're talking about

pretty much all of the past, aren't we, and some of the present. People killing themselves over religion is not a new thing. So there are two questions there, aren't there, why the Aztecs believed in human sacrifice and also why they've been so fetishized historically. Why is it that we focus on this one culture that commits religious violence and not others? And I think the answer to that is colonialism.

One of the justifications for invasion was human sacrifice and cannibalism. And so, of course, the Spanish found it everywhere that they went. A literal legal justification for enslavement in Spanish culture at that time was cannibalism and sacrifice, anything that put them beyond the pale. So, of course, they find sacrifice and emphasize it. From an Aztec point of view, sacrifice has been going on in that region in Mesoamerica for millennia before they come to power. And when we talk about the Aztecs, we're talking about people who would have called themselves the Meshika or the Tenaka, the people of Tenoshitan, on the site of what is now Mexico City.

I think it's important to say they wouldn't have called themselves that. And for them, their belief in sacrifice comes from a long history of myths that established the idea that gods let blood from themselves, or in some cases, ripped their own bodies apart to become the world. And so they have to feed the world, feed the gods with blood in order to keep that world turning, in order that the gods will have the energy to keep the world going. it's what's often called the blood debt. Where did the word Aztec come from? It comes from Ashtlan. So Azclan is the mythical or mythohistorical origin place of the Aztecs to the north of Tenosh Chitlan.

They've migrated down into the valley and they settle up what is now Tenosh Chitlan in about 1325. And it's possible that other people called them the Aztecs as like a word meaning foreigner at that time, But Aztec as we know it is invented in the 18th century, meaning people of Asclan by a scholar called claviero and it just sort of sticks. Wow. When you're looking at this group of people, one of the biggest issues as a historian that you must face is what sources are you using? Because that will come down to what did this group of people leave behind to say about themselves and how much of it is other colonising people?

writing about them. So as a historian, how do you even start to navigate that? It's incredibly difficult, to be honest, because we have no pre-invasion alphabetic sources. Although the Aztecs had a very rich pictographic literary culture, it was all destroyed by the Spanish during the invasion because they feared these were religious texts. We have maybe 13 texts for all of Central Mexico, so a few from other cultures that survived, but none for National Shetland itself. It's such a small number. And we do have some archaeology, obviously, and oral testimonies that were recorded after the invasion and descendant testimonies. And we have pictographic sources that were created after the invasion. But by and large, we're dependent on

alphabetic texts that were either created by Spaniards looking at Aztec culture or being informed by indigenous people or some cases by descendants of the indigenous people themselves or Mesthetes or mixed heritage people. So you really are dealing with multiple filters all the time in trying to disentangle this stuff, especially when you're talking about stuff like sexuality, where so much judgment comes into it from the Catholic point of view. One of the few things that I know about, and it might have even been Aztec culture, it might have been a different Mesoamerican culture, was that when the Spanish turned up to colonize everyone, they translated their language, but they brought with them their judgment. So there was a word, which I'm not even if I'm not

going to attempt to pronounce, which translated roughly to something as bringer of joy, and there's been some suggestion that they may have been someone who had sex with people, and the Catholics just translated it as whore, prostitute. And I thought that it's such a succinct way of going, that's the problem with this stuff, because they've completely, they've layered it with judgment, they've brought their own value system to it, and now we've lost whatever this thing actually was. Absolutely. I think the word you're probably going for is Ahoyani, which is like pleasure women, often translated, as you say, prostitutes, haws, concubines, all of these judgmental words that implies something specific,

but is actually probably a word that covers lots and lots of different kinds of women. It's really, really difficult. There's another word which is really symptomatic of this tendency that we're talking about, and that word is clatsoli. The Spanish translate it to mean sin, but it actually means dirt or stuff out of place, filth, trash, something like that. And it's really fascinating because for the Aztecs, they don't believe in. good or bad. Things aren't sinful or evil or positive. I can't think what the opposite to

sinful is. Virtuous? Virtuous, that's probably yes. Thank you. Things aren't either sinful or virtuous. It's all about keeping the world in balance. You need some clats or leaf for things like fertility, but if you have too much, then you tip over into an unbalanced world and everything, the gods will be dissatisfied and it will be problematic. So we have to see everything in a very, very different way while dealing with texts that say a good woman is like this and a bad woman is like this and knowing that's not how the people at the time would have seen it. What was that word again? Clatsorley.

And that means filth, filth, trash, dirt, stuff out of place I like as a description for it because it takes away some of the negative connotations of it. It's not that Clatsoli was something negative. It was something that was superfluous to them that they could have too much of it. Yes, that's right. Clatsoli is all around and it's really significant, in fact, kind of in this context that the indigenous word for intercourse, the Nahuat word for intercourse is clalik Pakayot, which means like earthiness or earthy desire. So everything is related to the earth and to earthly powers and to fertility. And Clatsoli is tied up with all of those things. But if you have too much, of it the world will fall into disorder. So much of Aztec ritual is about keeping the world in order. Women do all this sweeping, which of course the Spanish sea is just a domestic task, but is actually to do with keeping that clatsoli out. It's to do with balance. It's a ritual act. And the same is

true in sexuality. If you have too much sex, you get drained and you lose all your clatsoli. But if you don't have any, then that's also problematic because you have no fertility and no energy. It's all about that moderation is the value that they seem to most privilege. Wow. So what kind of things would you do that would mean you would get too much of this? And what could you do to rebalance it apart from sweeping? Well, too much clatsoli or too little clatsoli is tied up with pleasure. It's tied up with sexuality very frequently. And the interesting thing about Aztec sexuality is that it's not separated from other forms of sensual pleasure. So you see them talking about flowers and scents and tastes.

And these are often metaphors as well for sexuality. So gluttony is really problematic. There's these wonderful things called the Weweit Latoli, which are these speeches that were preserved after the invasion. And they depict Aztecs, the one that's given by a parent to their child, depicts Aztecs as walking along a mountain peak. And if you go too far in one direction,

you'll tip into darkness and too far in the other direction. And it depends where, you're a man or a woman. So young men are believed to have had a fixed amount of semen, we think, which could be depleted over the course of your lifetime. So the speeches by fathers to the sons say things like, you know, don't expend all your sexuality too early, don't become drained, where for women it's totally different. There's actually an amazing speech which you might like where they say if you have too much sex too young, you'll shrivel up and you will cease to perhaps while you are still in your full manhood, you will have exhausted yourself.

You can no longer do anything to your spouse. So they're quite explicit about it. That's fascinating because that idea that if you lose too much of your semen, that you are going to drain your energy, that crops up in cultures all around the world. The Victorians were nuts about that one, this idea that if you masturbated too much, you would just wither and die. But you also see it in Japanese culture and Chinese culture. And that's amazing that that's in Aztec culture as well, this idea that if you do it too often, that's bad for you.

Seaman's very important. We've got to keep it in the body. Of course, the ideal and the reality are sometimes different. And we do know that semen also is important in the production of babies. So for the first few months of a pregnancy, the man and the woman are supposed to keep having sex so that the man can help grow the baby. But then you have to stop or the baby will get too big and it will come out all covered in filth, they say. And given that babies always do come out like that, you kind of wonder what people thought was going on. But it is clear that both men and women participate in this creation of a baby. And that is very much about clitoriali and energy, things like that.

It's all, like, the way I'm kind of like hearing you talk about, it's almost like Clatolle is a kind of health that we might talk about today. Everyone's trying to get the perfect balance to be healthy and that you can, you know, do too much of this or too little of that. What about women? So men was, don't be having too much sex, otherwise terrible things will. happen. What about women? Do we have records of how their bodies were understood, how they understood this concept of Clatsoli? Well, we do know that women are very associated with fertility, and so their actions are considered really important. At the time they give birth, for example, they're believed to be literally embodied by Siwakot, the woman's snake, who is one of the goddesses of

fertility. And so if they die during childbirth, their bodies stay literally imbued with goddess and they have to protect the body. The husband, it's really poignant actually stands guard over the body for several days after she dies to try and stop young warriors stealing pieces of her body because they're imbued with the goddess. So women had this sort of threatening but also creative sexuality which again you see across the world in lots and lots of different cultures, this idea of creativity and destruction being closely associated. In terms of sexuality, of course, the Spanish missionaries don't go around interviewing that many women about their sexual desires. So we are often reading against the grain. What is clear, though, from the speeches is that

sex is supposed to be a pleasure for both men and women, as long as it happens within the appropriate boundaries, which in the ideal is marriage. A man and a woman are supposed to satisfy each other, share this joy. It's described by the parents as one of these, the things that mitigates the sadnesses of the world is sex. There's an amazing mythical history that gives us a very different idea of women's sexuality, though, which is where it's a pre-Aztec legend that is preserved in their histories where two elderly women are being prosecuted for adultery, and they were having sex with these young men. And the king says, why on earth are you still having sex with these young men at your age? And she says that they have an abyss inside them, a chasm that needs to be

filled and it's really, really, again, quite explicit. They do get convicted, unfortunately, but they're quite explicit. That desire is something that carries on when you're older. It isn't something that disappears. Oh, I love that. Desire is such an interesting concept to trace throughout history and different cultures interpreting it. And if you look at Western culture, for an awful lot of it, women were considered to be

more highly sexed than men. They were the sexual aggressors and men were just their gregors. and men were just there going, no, no, no, stay away from my special semen. I need to stay healthy and virtuous. But in Aztec culture, do you have any sense of, is it just even Stevens across the board, sex is fun, sex is to be enjoyed? Or is there an idea that men or women are more into it than the other one? It's hard to tell because of the Spanish sources, which impose so many moral judgments on it. It does feel a little bit like there's some texts that suggest men kind of can't help themselves. and so they have to be protected from this.

And there's also some texts that suggest, despite the ideal that you should only have sex in marriage, young men in particular are having premarital sex while in the warrior house, which is where they train as young men, and before going to battle, probably with these Aoyani, these courtisans, as they're often called,

whether they're prostitutes who live in the house or whether they come in for this purpose, we don't know. But there are these references that make it seem very likely, in fact that young men in particular are having premarital sex. It may be that young women are too. There are references to the fact that a woman may have one child and then she has to decide whether to keep the man and marry him or move on and find somebody else.

There is a reference to that. So it is possible. And of course, it's really hard with the kind of sources we have that say men do this and women do this and that preserve these idealized discourses to work out what the reality was. What we do know is that it seems to be extramarital sex, so adultery rather than premarital sex, which is clamped down on, particularly perhaps because they don't have primogenita. So it doesn't matter whether you're the firstborn or the power, even in elite families, it goes to the most competent male relative, which might be a brother. It's not even necessarily a son.

Wow. That's fascinating. So you've mentioned marriage a few times here. What did marriage look like in Aztec culture? Again, because my own perspective of it, I suppose, is very westernised. It's very going up the aisle. Your father gives you away. What would marriage look like for Aztec people? Marriage is not a religious ceremony in Aztec culture. It's a community ceremony. And it would depend whether you were elite or ordinary. But what is quite clear is that it's intended as a partnership that forms the basis. of society. So it's when you get married that a young man is entered into the tribute roles, when you start participating in communal works, giving to the community. It's the moment

when both young men and young women enter adulthood. So the whole ceremony is emphasized in a way that is about balance. It's structured so you have these parallel ceremonies. The groom's mother feeds the bride's and the bride's mother feeds the grooms some food. They share gifts. they actually tie their capes together. So they literally tie the knot as part of the ceremony, which I was find incredibly interesting. And then at the end of the ceremony, they are secluded for four days, during which time they're not supposed to have sex. And this is supposed to be a ritual moment where they are fasting and giving thanks to the gods,

and it's about abstinence. But for me, it also feels like a period of time when they can get to know each other before they're expected to enter the adult world and indeed to have sex, whether they do or don't, we don't know, they're secluded. But the fact that you're not supposed to have sex with your wife for four days, when she's probably younger than you, not very, very young, unless elite, so they seem to be mid to late teens, the girls are getting married,

not adult in our terms, but not these very, very young marriages we see in other cultures because they're expected at that moment to become a productive unit in the community, and you can't do that if you're a child, have to be an adult. So these four days do feel like a moment of pause to get to know the husband before you're expected to go out into society and also to have sex with him. I'll be back with Caroline after this short break. I'm just picturing, you've just married your Aztec husband, mothers have fed people, and then you just go at the shed and you're like, so, how are you?

Yeah, it's weird, isn't it? You've got to try and get to know. I mean, it's not a shed, I should say. It's like a clay house, probably. And if you're elite, they have. masonry houses. Only elite people are allowed houses of more than one story. Nobles have two-story masonry houses. Let's talk about sexuality in Aztec culture. What evidence do we have or is left to us about what we would now call queer sexualities? Because they would certainly have been there. If there were anything about the human experience, they were there. But how do you interpret that? It is an area of enormous dispute and contestation because the sources are so fragmentary. So we do have references to what you would consider LGBTQ plus peoples. The problem being,

of course, that not only are we looking at them with our contemporary eyes, but we then have to deal with the fact that the Catholic, Spanish, are looking at them with their points of view, which are incredibly negative about anything we might see as queer experiences. And then I'm sure that indigenous Nahuah peoples had a variety of beliefs about these kinds of people who cross gender and sexual boundaries. Now, the difficulty is that even the language is problematic. So we have words like Shoshiva, which means possessor of flowers, but is often translated as being a transsexual person. That's what Lisa Sousa calls it, someone who is trans, or is, or is, you. In one case as pervert, it's been translated as pervert or homosexual.

So you get this massive variety of translations. And then there's the word Patlatche, which is most commonly translated as intersex or amaphrodite, but could mean lesbian. And then there's this quiloni, there's this third one who is translated as everything from a Sodomite, which is what the colonial texts translate that word as, to a... queer person. It's incredibly difficult to think about these different identities. We do have some images that suggest that it's possible that clothing may have been transvested during sexual activity. The difficulty we have is that pretty much every available source for Tenoshtitlan

specifically says it was illegal and punishable by death to be a homosexual or anything in that category because of course I'm implying, even by saying homosexual, I'm implying that it's an identity rather than an act. And we don't know if that's how people saw themselves in that period. So we have this picture that shows someone dressed as a male and someone dressed in traditionally female dress for this period with a flower between them. Now, it's been interpreted as relating to the text around the trans people and that this indicates a trans person because flowers represent sexuality propositioning a man and that it's a queer relationship. The problem is that we don't actually know that because it's not right next to that text.

So it could be a man and a woman discussing sex theoretically. It seems likely it's related to the text around queer relationships, but we don't actually know that. And all of the texts for Ternostitlan say that people were burned or executed in some other horrible way for anything approaching queer relationships. But sources for the surrounding area suggest that there may have been people who live their lives in trans identities, you know, that I'm hesitant with the word trans because that's probably not how they would have seen it. For me, it feels like it's maybe something closer to what Butler would have seen as performativity

where by doing the role of a woman, you become a woman, for example. So it's to do with the role that you take on. If when you're young, your family decide that you'll, or you decide that you'll do the role of a woman and dress as a woman, that's what makes you the woman. And vice versa. Now, we do have evidence for that. We have evidence in other places around Tenoshitlan, fragmentary evidence. We have a lot of Spanish assertions that there was a lot of, they're interested in men having sex with other men. We don't hear about what we'd call lesbianism at all. But you tend to get that mentioned far more by Spaniards who are hostile to Indigenous people than you do people who are supportive of them. So how much do you credit that? Or is it just another

criticism like they are all cannibals? It's so, so difficult. And people like Richard Trexler, for example, have tried to balance this out by using sources from lots of different places. But for me, that's just as problematic because you're then assuming that the rights of one indigenous culture translate onto those of another. That is fraught, isn't it? I'm not sure how good a job I've done of explaining how complicated this is and the various things we do have evidence for. You've smashed that out at the park. That is incredibly complicated and so difficult to try and look at this evidence and understand what waiting it is that you're going to give it. From your point of view, if I was to the words that have been left with, the ones that mean

possessor of flowers, for your money, if you were to, you know, try and put a bet on it, what's your opinion on what these words mean? I think Joshua, I think possessor of flowers. means that there is some, probably some kind of trans identity or some sort of gender diverse identity, as we would see it. It's possible that the Aztecs at that time actually didn't see it like that and simply saw it as people who were of and crossed the boundary because they do go to an awful lot of effort in Tenosh Chitlan in particular,

as opposed to other areas around, in making males and females grow up in these two boxes. So at birth, there are rituals that dedicate men to the battlefield and women to the home. They grow up as soon as they're weaned, boys are reared by their fathers and girls by their mothers. If they get divorced, the sons go with the father and the daughters go with the mother. And there's so many aspects of the society that are really rooted in this idea of the gender binary. Women are given enormous value and significance in this binary, but they are separated out. And the work of people like Cecilia Klein has argued that this is because gender is seen as a fluid thing that needs pinning down.

Now, I wasn't sure about that when I wrote my book, but that was 20 years ago. And actually, I'm thinking of rewriting the last chapter on gender diverse and LGBTQ peoples because I think that it can be. approached in a different way now and it ought to be approached in a different way now. I think it very likely than in turn of shit land, it was in fact illegal to cross-genders because anything that was socially disruptive was stamped down on very hard in this very organized city. Now that doesn't mean that other people who we might broadly describe as queer didn't exist in and around the city. And there is a little hint that there is some gender crossing. So there's a description of men chewing chickley, which is kind of chewing gum in the marketplace.

And only young women, sexually available women and prostitutes chewed chickly. It indicates sexual availability. So if you're young or sexually available. And the source says that these men are effeminate. If there's a social mark of a being in a feminine man, presumably that category must exist. And we know these people existed in every part of history. I'm not denying the existence of people who stood outside the gender boundary or the sexual boundary. I just think it is possible that they were not permitted or at the very least discouraged.

In the same way, in fact, that adultery is punishable by death in Aztec culture for both men and women. And that's because it's socially disruptive. It breaks down these categories that are so important in organizing Aztec society. and so important for them in making the city into this really effective war machine. Yes. It must be such a difficult area of study for anyone who's studying a culture that is pre-colonial, pre-before someone from the West turned up and went. Actually, I think you should be doing it this way, everybody,

because there is, I don't know if it's a move, but there's a need and a want amongst a lot of people, myself included actually, to find evidence of sexuality and queerness and transness and all these things before a colonisation, because then it gives you something to look forward, as if to say, we haven't always done it the way we're doing it now. Things are changeable. These sexualities have been studied before,

and as much as you want that to happen, you have to be so careful with that. Do you feel that kind of tension as you're researching this? Absolutely, because I really very much understand why there is a desire to discover queer lives in the past, and I share that desire. And it is quite clear that indigenous societies had very, very different ideas of gender

to Western societies, or European Christian societies, or indeed African societies. You know, there's an enormous diversity. So we have to be incredibly careful in representing that diversity as well as simply asserting that queer lives existed. Because we know that there were so many different attitudes,

so many different kinds of people. Lily Gladstone has talked wonderfully about how being two-spirit, which is a modern term invented to cover a wide range of indigenous non-binary identities. Lily Gladstone, who was nominated for the Oscar, has talked wonderfully about the fact that they are non-binary, they are she, they, and how simply saying my language doesn't have gendered pronouns. And so I don't see myself like that.

decolonising act. Wow. Now that doesn't have gendering in all the words. In order to make something female, they put siwa, meaning woman on it. The verbs don't have gender like he and she. So we often don't know who's actually doing something. And many of the translations assume masculinity, but it could be a woman doing something. So even the language shows really different attitudes to gender.

And I do not doubt that there are incredible diverse lives to be. found. And the work of scholars like Jamie Jesperson, who is a fantastic young scholar working on Nahuah, trans identities, she's a trans scholar working on trans identities and has talked a lot about trans misogyny in the colonial archive and how that works to erase these identities and how we should recover that richness. She has a wonderful article about it. These kinds of scholars doing this kind of work are so important. And that's part of why I want to go back and revisit my work, because I think about it totally differently to the way I did in 2004 when I finished my doctorate, which is really where the book came from. I mean, it's two decades, right? We've evolved,

societies evolve, what I know has changed so much. So even though the sources maybe haven't changed that much, how I would read them and the significance I might see in them is very different. That's fascinating. My, well, favourite area of study, but one of the areas that's really important to me is the history of sex work and the history of people selling sex and who these people were and how they were treated. Because I think it says a lot about a culture how it views sex, commerce, gender when you're looking at the people who are selling and buying sex. And you've mentioned it a couple of times already. So there is a culture of sex work within Aztec culture. Can you tell me a bit more about that? Were these people respected? Do we know much about their lives? I'm going to say it's very

difficult to tell again because the problem is that the Spanish is so judgmental about sex work that that comes through in the sources. Now, there are lots of different words for sex workers in NOAA. And so it's possible that that reflects lots of different roles. Some people have argued that we should distinguish between women in a brothel, women who work on the street, because there is no suggestion of male sex work in the sources, with the exception of some references to young men who transvest as women in the temples in some areas and may perhaps be part of sexual rituals. Apart from that, there's no suggestion of male sex work. It's always gendered female. And the most common words we said is Awiani, but there are all these other words that

imply that perhaps there were different ways of procuring sex, that there may have been women who lived in the palace, who were effectively what you'd think of as concubines, who were sex workers, that there were women who lived in brothels, that there were some who worked on the streets. It is hard to tell them because the sources for this are not only complex, but they're after the conquest. So it might reflect later practices, not necessarily pre-conquest practices. I very much doubt the culture that is, in many ways, so sex positive doesn't, have reasonably well-known avenues for procuring sex, though. And there are references to things like drugs that you can take to increase your

virility and how you have to be careful with them because they can also kill you, which imply there's a sort of threat there with prostitutes, which is super interesting. That is. So if you could buy sex, then that means that this was a society built on commerce. They had money? No. A system of people. They don't have money.

They don't have money, but they do. have goods that they exchange. So cacao beans perform the function of small coins, essentially, and then large capes would have functioned as gold, quills of gold are for larger exchanges. So you have standardised media of exchange, effectively. But we don't know what they paid for sex with. We don't know. Don't say that. I need to think that people are selling sex for chocolate beans for some reason. Well, you can. I mean, they probably did. I'm sure. they did in fact because it's a very common medium of exchange though it's quite a low value to be exchanging for but the images don't give us much help they sometimes see alcohol being

profit as part of the exchange because alcohol is quite prohibited in Aztec culture so it's it's a taboo thing for a lot of society there is one image that shows a man offering a Spanish coin to a prostitute but it's much later clearly oh that's fascinating so my final question that I'd like to ask you today. And honestly, you've been so amazing. I could just keep you here for hours and just keep asking your stuff, but I can't. You've mentioned the gods a lot,

and it seems that spirituality, deities, gods, was very, very intimate in everyday life. Were there sex gods? Were there gods that were to do with sexuality and sexual behaviour? There are gods that are to do with sexuality, but it's not specific again. So Shoshiketsal is a god of pleasure, so often associated with drinking and flowers as well as sexuality. Coming back to what we're talking about earlier, you have Clatsul Thiot, who is the goddess of filth,

but that's sexuality and earth and drunkenness. And there's a suggestion that if you commit adultery or do something that too increases your Tlatzoli, as we were talking about, you can go to her and confess and have some of your balance, restored to you. The idea of confession feels a bit Catholic, so it makes me a little bit worried about it, but we do know that offerings were made to her in that kind of context. She is the goddess of balance, as well as the goddess of sexuality. And you have really obvious sexual references in some of the divine stories like the fact that the god of the young maize is basically a kind of phallic figure with erect corn cob. You have images, infertility rituals,

of priests holding huge paper fallacies, this kind of thing. So sexuality is clearly part of those rituals. And like I said, I don't think it's separated out, though, from other kinds of force and belief in the same way. And that's one of the reasons I'm careful about talking about sexual identity. Even scholars who have been very strong on the idea, like Pete Segal who's done brilliant work on the idea of gender crossing in Aztec culture and homosexuality in Aztec culture,

he still says, but I don't think they would have thought of themselves in the way we would have thought of ourselves as queer people. It's a different kind of identity. But sex is really central to ritual and it also seems to be really out there and obvious. And there was one other thing I wanted to share with you, which was a poem that I wanted to tell you about. So there's this wonderful event where in 1479, the ruler of Shea Cat, he has conceded. this region and women of that region are performing in the palace. And they do basically a sexy recitation, a song, a performance designed to mock his masculinity. And it talks about how she says, King, little a share cat, so she's like diminishing him, my little hand is itching again and again,

you want to seize my breast, even my heart. Now perhaps you will ruin my body painting. like rubbing together. You will lie watching the coming of the green Ketchol bird flower. I will put you inside of me. Your chin lies there. I will rock you in my arms. And there's loads more of this. And it's basically about them saying, well, yes, you've conquered us,

but we can take power back over you. But it's also really sexually explicit performance happening in the Aztec Palace and being enjoyed by the ruler. Wow. That was not related to your question. but I did want to tell you about it. Just the image that they've been conquered and they're putting on a show

and they've decided to go with the angle of okay, you've conquered us but we're going to shaggy brains out, mate. That's unbelievable. That suggests a lot of balshiness. And like you said, a lot of comfort within sexual identity. This isn't something that's being hushed up

and embarrassed and people don't want to talk about. And if you live in kind of communal societies with one-room houses, I guess you would grow up knowing a lot more about sex than we do today where it's hidden away often. Caroline, you have been unbelievable to talk to today. I've had so much fun. And if people want to know more about you and your work,

where can they find you? You can find me on all of the social media platforms. I'm on Twitter at Caroline Penick and similar names elsewhere. And I have a book out that you can get in Waterston's in paperback called On Savage Shore. which isn't about this.

My first book is Bonds of Blood, but this one is about Indigenous peoples coming to Europe after 1492. So just like we've been doing a little bit, trying to flip the script on that story of conquest and invasion and discovery and think instead about Indigenous people discovering us. Caroline, thank you so much. You have been a treat. Thank you very much for having me.

Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to Caroline for joining me. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. If you want us to explore a subject or maybe you just want to say hello, much like Nick did for this episode, then you can email us at betwixt at history hit.com. We've got episodes on everything from sexuality in ancient Greece to Elvis Presley's sex life, all coming your way. This podcast was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith,

the senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.