THE MO(U)RNING AFTER

Most of us have been there: Waking up from a night of heavy partying, wondering how you got home, looking for your phone, and beating yourself up for no good reason. Perhaps you’re even feeling a bit of unfounded shame; unaware of what you may or may not have done the night before, you’re already mentally preparing for the worst. It sucks, right?

Well, if you still have all your hair, it wasn’t that bad. Had this happened in fourteenth-century Aztec culture, you’d be looking for a wig AND your dignity. To learn more about this, let’s take a fermented field trip to Tenochtitlán. Now the site of modern-day Mexico City, Tenochtitlán was founded as the Aztec religious capital in 1325. And this city-state was home to more than just human sacrifice and sun worship—it was also home to a lot of drunks. (It was like Arizona State University but without all the blonde hair and beer bongs.)

It’s well known that the Aztecs were incredibly faithful to their gods, but most people don’t know that they were also incredibly forceful with their drinking laws. It seems odd to me that a civilization with religious practices that involved literally bathing the temple steps in human blood would have such harsh punishments for bathing your liver. So just how harsh were these punishments? Well, public intoxication was punishable by death. That is, unless you were attending a festival, or you were over the age of seventy.

Seriously, those were the rules. If you were having organized fun, or you were simply old as fuck, you got a free pass to be a drunk ass. Basically, life six hundred to seven hundred years ago wasn’t much different from life today. The Aztecs turned a blind eye to intoxication during celebrations and to certain individuals—much like we do with drug use at music festivals and your grandma’s dirty old-lady mouth at family gatherings when she’s had a few too many.

Anyway, back to the death penalty for drunken partying: It wasn’t something that was used on first-time offenders; it was a punishment reserved for repeated overindulgence. You had to be a serious nuisance to earn that sentence. First-time public drunkards were generally subjected to public ridicule, like property destruction or forcible head shaving. (If you ask me, that might be a fate worse than death because there’s no way a skilled barber was doing the shaving.)

Remember this the next time you wake up from a night of getting a little too wasted: As long as you have your phone, hair, and pictures to reflect on, you probably had a good night.