Modern medicine knows that alcohol can impede the development of the human brain. Laws prohibiting the sale of alcohol to children below a certain age attempt to protect the growing brains of our youth, but the ages vary from place to place. Deviation in drinking age reflects that these legal choices stem from culture just as much as science. Most places say 18, America famously says 21, and some Middle Eastern countries say not at all. It seems that most cultures agree–alcohol is not a drink for the youth.
The ancient Aztecs were infamous for their strict drinking rules and their ‘drinking age’ was extremely high. In Tenochtitlan, the drink of choice was the fermented sap of the agave, known as octli in the empire’s Nahuatl and pulque in the conquistador’s Spanish. If someone was caught drinking when they should not have been, they could be enslaved or even killed. Only the elites, warriors, and elderly were permitted to drink the brew regularly and become drunk. The elderly had to be 52 years old!
Compared to the world average of 18, 52 years old is ancient. These Aztecs were retired, that is no longer economically active, and drinking was their earned prerogative. It was not, however, that they had their first drink at the age of 52 like an American might at 21. Rather, all Aztecs periodically got to drink at government sanctioned religious festivals. During one of these festivals, the pilauano or Pillahuana, the Aztecs swung to the opposite extreme; children aged 9 and 10 were made to get drunk for the first time.
The festival in question occurred in conjunction with either the Tepeilhuitl celebration to the rain god Tlaloc, or once every 4 years during the month of Izcalli in celebration of the fire god Xiuhtecuhtli. Regardless of when it was observed, the Pillahuana was only celebrated in a limited geographic area. Only the Tlahuica Aztec who lived in what is Morelos state today celebrated this event under the auspices of the goddess of fertility and love, Xochiquetzal. Generally speaking, the festival is not well documented, but folio 41 of the Codex Magliabechiano shows the goddess with two drinking children and describes it in a few words.
In translation, the Codex reads:
the same day they celebrated another feast which they called Pillahuana which means drunkenness of the children because during it children of nine or ten years old danced with girls and they gave each other to drink until they got drunk, afterward they committed other sins. And this was not general for all of them, but performed by the Tlahuicas, which are in warm lands on irrigation plains.
So what was this Pillahuana? The festival’s name itself is informative. It is an agglutination of pilli (children) and tlauana (to become drunk), a literal translation is “The Drunkenness of the Children.” This same term spelt “pillaoano” in the text of the friar Sahagun, was also related to a ceremony known as Tlacoçolaquilo which was a ceremony for placing infants into their cribs. Pillaoano or a feast of eating and drinking followed. This particular use of the term must just be a linguistic coincidence, for the actual festival was not so domestic.
Sources that point to the Codex Magliabechiano say that this event occurred during the Tepeilhuitl to the rain god. They say that the Pillahuana celebration involved children dancing, children drinking, and children committing sexual acts with one another. In this version, the festival was an initiation rite into adulthood and acted as a fertility sacrifice to the rain god who was responsible for a successful corn crop.
Other accounts which may reference Sahagun’s mention of the festival say that this event occurred during the celebration to the fire god once every 4th year. The Aztec, who were successful keepers of complex calendars, understood the need for Leap Years. In this version, parents selected imauiuan and intlauan or godfathers and godmothers for their children. These guardians took the children to the festival where they had their ears pierced before the temple of the fire god and may have watched their first human sacrifice. The family then dined together.
In both versions a coming-of-age is apparent. These were children on the brink of pubescence who were being initiated into the adult world of the Aztec through sexual acts, sacrifices, and alcohol. The ritual consumption of pulque is clearly an important part of that coming-of-age, just as taking shots is today for an American’s 21st birthday.
Mentions of the Pillahuana occur in the obscurity of Mesoamerican scholarship. There really are no primary accounts of the event, and most scholarship relies on the same source or two. The fact that it was only practiced by one of the 7 Aztec ethnicities makes the details of the celebration all the more difficult to reconstruct.
A festival of drunken children in a society that only lets the elderly get drunk is surely out of place. While we cannot know all of the beliefs that coalesced in the celebration of the Pillahuana, we can see that alcohol and age were closely linked in Aztec culture. For these peoples, alcohol was a symbol of the passage of time, either a coming-of-age or a retirement. Even though there were no bouncers in Tenochtitlan to check IDs for age, culture always codifies rules around the acceptable consumption of booze: age is a nearly universal target.
Bruman, Henry J., and Peter T. Furst. Alcohol in Ancient Mexico. Univ. of Utah Pr., 2001.
“Codex Magliabechiano : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming.” Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/codex-magliabechiano/page/n81/mode/2up.
Hernández, Miriam López. “Ahuianime: las seductoras del mundo nahua prehispánico/Ahuianime: The Seductive Women of the Prehispanic Nahua World.” Revista Española de Antropología Americana 42.2 (2012): 401.
Graulich, Michael. “Aztec Festivals of the Rain Gods.” (2015) Bd. 12 (1992)
Mihok, Lorena Diane, “Cognitive Dissonance in Early Colonial Pictorial Manuscripts from Central Mexico” (2005). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/770
“Pillahuana.” Pillahuana. | Nahuatl Dictionary, https://nahuatl.uoregon.edu/content/pillahuana.
Sahagún, Bernardino de, et al. Histoire générale des choses de la Nouvelle-Espagne. G. Masson, 1880. Sabin Americana: History of the Americas, 1500-1926, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CY0107427103/SABN?u=balt85423&sid=bookmark-SABN&xid=fedec2a1&pg=116. Accessed 29 Dec. 2021
Schmal, John P. “Indigenous Morelos: The Land of the Tlahuica.” Indigenous Mexico, 11 Oct. 2019, https://indigenousmexico.org/morelos/indigenous-morelos-the-land-of-the-tlahuica/.
Vian, Thibault. “L’initiation sexuelle des enfants Tlahuicas dans la Nueva España.” (2020).
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