We don’t have to drink alcohol. I mean, we don’t have to drink alcohol to get drunk. Drinking is only the most obvious and comfortable option for those of us who wish to ingest the inebriant. More adventurous souls can opt for absorption into the bloodstream via the nostril by snorting, the lungs by inhaling, the mouth by absorption, or the rectum by enema. 

These methods are less common for obvious reasons, including increased risks to our health. While the cons outweigh the pros for most, there are still some who endeavor to try them. The last of these methods, politely referred to here as an enema, has received certain attention in pop culture in the last decades. College students are rumored to boof liquor in order to absorb the alcohol more quickly through the blood vessels in their sophomoric rectums. While their slang may be new and frightening, most people would be surprised to hear that they aren’t doing anything new. In fact, they are following in the footsteps of the Ancient Mayans. 

The Mayans had access to a variety of different kinds of alcohol. They had pineapple wine, corn beer, agave wine, and some version of mead. The last two, agave wine and mead, were the most common of the Mayan inebriants and were known as chih and balché respectively. Chih was made from the fermented sap of the agave plant, which could be mixed with various barks or roots to instigate a fermentation. This drink was common throughout ancient Mesoamerica. Balché, on the other hand, was more uniquely Mayan. It was made from water, the bark of the balché tree, and honey that was either wild or harvested from famous domesticated bees of the Yucatán (which make pricey Melipona honey). 

These alcohols were not just a social lubricants for the Mayans, they were also social glues. Mayans lived in an increasingly more complex civilization starting around the year 200 CE. Alcohol built ties between royalty and elites who drank in rituals together and reinforced hierarchy when the elite provided the peasantry with drinks. These beverages also served spiritual purposes. The collective worldview of the Mayans was important to societal cohesion and religion helped to describe it. The god Ahkan ruled over intoxication, agony, and violent death. Drunkenness represented a form of communication with the divine. Meanwhile, the deity known as God N or Pahuatun, who controlled many things in Mayan life, also moonlighted as a god of vomit and enemas. If drinking meant commune with the gods, what did an enema mean? 

The alcoholic enemas of the Mayans have only recently been accepted in Mesoamerican scholarship. In the 1970s, one vase was finally shown to conclusively depict enemas. It captures a surprisingly domestic scene with men, their wives, and even babies. Two rows of men and women sit around vats with some men inserting tubes into their butts and other with identical tubes tucked into their waists. It is unclear why such an obvious scene took so long to understand. Perhaps scholars were too square to acknowledge it. Since then, the unmistakable signs of enema use in Mayan art have been well recognized. Most depictions of bubbling vats of chih also show a tool dubbed an “enema syringe” resting on top of the booze.