The curative use of Cocoa in Mesoamerican history and heritage

Discover the curative use of cocoa among the Maya & Mexica/Aztec of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica, based on reports from the colonial era to the present day.

Theobroma Cacao

Family: Malvaceae
Nahuatl: cacahuatl
Tzeltal, K’iche’ & Classic Maya: kakaw
Sayula Popoluca: kagaw
Spanish: Cacao
English: cacao tree, cocoa tree

The discovery of chocolate was ever a story of many dimensions, and the telling of the tale depended on the cacao fruit and seeds used as medicine, food, or drink. Due to the stimulant effects it was intimately related to deities, gods, and mortals.

Actually, it makes sense from a scientific point of view. Cacao has a complex chemistry, which varies by the part of the plant, its stage of maturation, and the manner of processing, like fermenting and roasting.

Scientists have classified the pharmacological activity of cacao into three large categories:

• Antioxidants slow the oxidation of chemicals in the body by free oxygen radicals, like flavoroid phenolics, which prevents the oxidation of LSD cholesterol, as well as quercetin known as both an antioxidant and anti-inflammatory.
• Neuroactives cause changes in brain function,
• Stimulants increase activity of the central nervous system and energy or awareness. These alkaloids or methyl xanthines are caffeine, theobromine, and theophylline, all of which have significant physiological effects on humans.

The folkloristic notion that chocolate has aphrodisiac properties has been revived over and over again. Today, this has centered on one of chocolate’s many chemical compounds, created especially after microbial fermentation: Phenylethylamine.

This mood-altering chemical is said to be released into the brain when one is in love; although Phenylethylamine has never been proved to stimulate sexual desire and performance. Let’s hope that this will be the case, and thus lower the demand for tiger penis, rhinoceros horn and the like!

It is very probable that the Aztecs were mixing cacao with alcoholic substances. There is a long tradition of plants being used for alcoholic beverages, like pulque made from maguey plants or chicha, beer made from maize or quinoa. The use of stimulants such as cacao and yerba mate, guayusa, guarana, yoco, coca, and tobacco was almost universal throughout the Americas.

Cacao – or traces of the compounds theobromine and caffeine – have been found in archaeological deposits from a number of civilizations ranging from the Chaco Canyon in New Mexico to Guatemala.

Mesoamerican chocolate

History shows us, that Mesoamericans were every bit as capable of applying individual taste and invention to the cocoa.

Pre-Conquest chocolate was not a single concoction to be drunk. It was a vast and complex array of drinks, gruels, porridges, powders, and probably solid substances, to all of which a wide variety of flavorings could be added.

The Mayans (c. 1000BC– 900 CE) used dozens of flavorings, from chillies to vanilla. Evidence from codices show elaborate cacao recipes were produced also by the Aztec people (1300–1521).

Aztec/Mexica cultures prepared multiple drinks involving chocolate along with other ingredients such as: chilli, vanilla, ceiba seed, hueinacaztli (“great ear” type of flower), mexcaxochitl (“String flower”), Magnolia Mexicana, izquixochitl (“popcorn flower”), achiote, pimienta (black pepper) and many more.

In Peru, it was the Incas and their predecessors who grew cacao. Also the Incas used chocolate in an infusion considered medicinal and ritualistic.

The chocolate drink was mostly served on special occasions – births, feasts, inaugurations, healings, wedding ceremonies and funerary rituals (which sometimes involved the mixing of human blood into the drink).

Mesoamerican people eat a thick chocolate-maize or nixtamalli gruel and drunk it from a gourd.

Variations of cacao glyphs painted on pottery include:

SA’AL KAKAW – gruel-ish chocolate (probably corn + cacao)

Vessels excavated show, that the chocolate drink was consumed by the Aztec elite (nobility, lords, royal house, long-distance merchants, and warriors; but not priests). Painted ceramic jugs and cups, some with lids were kept specially for the occasion.

Fray Bernardino de Sahagún writes in his, Historia general de las cosas de nueva España, or Florentine Codex:

“And [after the meal] they would serve it [chocolate] in some xícaras [vessels] that they used for drinking [cacao], which are of many types. One of these is called tecontlacuilolli, ‘xícara painted with various designs,’ and its lid, called atzaccayotl, is very beautiful, as well as its turtle spoon, used to stir the cacao; other types of xícaras are called ayotectli tlacuilolli, ‘black xícara painted black,’ along with its circular base made of tiger skin or deerskin, used as a rest or seat for this gourd, called ayahualli, ocelohuatl, or cuetlaxayahualli.” García Garagarza 2023

In coastal and highland Guatemala, figurines and censer lids have been found adorned with representations of woman or goddess, with cacao pods growing from their bodies.

In the archaeological site of Río Azul, ceramic pots have been recovered that were used for cacao, as residue analysis has shown.

On another Maya chocolate-drinking cup known as the Princeton Vase (670–750 CE), a portion of the Popol Vuh, a sixteenth-century K’iche’ Maya mythological narrative is depicted.

The story of how the Hero Twins trick the lords of the underworld into requesting their own decapitations, starting their journey of death and resurrection.

As is common in mythological narratives throughout the Americas, these heroes win not through feats of brute strength but through cunning, and often humorous, trickery.

The Princeton vase also shows how the beverage likely has been frothed, by pouring chocolate – from a considerable height – from one vessel to another. The cocoa butter rises to the surface and froth is obtained.

Is there a curative use of the cacao beverage? Or would the Aztec elites drink it at the end of the meal (when smoking tobacco) during banquets as well as at ordinary meals just for enjoyment? Probably both.

The curative use of cocoa among the Maya & Mexica/Aztecs in Pre-hispanic Mesoamerica

Representing the dual aspects of the cosmos, a dark cacao chilate, and a white maize chilate are mixed with water. The ritual beverage of chilate is used in an important agricultural ritual to fertilize the earth.

It is not surprising to see the two most important crops in the Quiché/K’iche Maya economy reflected in mythology and symbolism. While the Popol Vuh describes maize itself as the symbolic and literal raw material out of which the original people are made, cacao may have been another key ingredient which brings humanity to life.

There are very few data on the cacao medicine in pre-Conquest times, as most of the knowledge we have, is derived from reports of the colonial era.

Not only was chocolate used for ritual purposes and the seeds as money, but it was avidly utilized for medicinal reasons. Healing and preventative medicines, as well as a tool for administering foul-tasting drugs, were the two primary medicinal uses for the chocolate.

It is likely that it was the fruit that was eaten or used to make beverages, rather than the processed seeds.

The 17th-century chronicler Antonio Fuentes y Guzmán, writing about the Pacific slopes of Guatemala, has this to say:

“But returning to record the virtues of cacao, one should know that as soon as it leaves the pod, it exudes a most excellent and very fresh liquid, which the Indians take from it with great dexterity.

They did this by piling the fresh, pulp-enclosed beans in a small, clean dugout canoe, in which from its own gravity the pulp expressed an abundant liquor of the smoothest taste, between sour and sweet, which is of the most refreshing coolness,” especially for relief from the unrelenting heat of the region.

Although Fuentes y Guzmán fails to tell us this: the drink was alcoholic – fermented cacao wine. As the process he describes was part of the usual fermentation involved in cacao production; indeed, such a ‘wine’ is still enjoyed in Chontalpa (Mexican state of Tabasco).

Aroma properties of the cocoa fruit pulp can have a pleasant zesty fruity flavor, the cacao fruit pulp is refreshing, and depending where you are and what cocoa pod you open, it can taste floral, honey, citrus-like and tropical.

The fermented or un-fermented drink was made from cacao pulp or seeds. However, the leaf and bark of the cacao tree was also used in infusions, decoctions, and tinctures.

It was known as a soothing agent, antiseptic, stimulant, snakebite remedy, or weight gain cure. Psychoactive preparations are also known in combination with other ingredients like psychoactive mushrooms, Salvia divinorum, coca, mate, cannabis and peyote.

The Mesoamericans may have found some more direct ways of delivering these compounds to their organism other than by drinking the cacao beverage, such as by smoking it or using a sublingual quid. Or via an enema, this last a known Maya method for administering hallucinogens.

The curative use of Cocoa among the Maya peoples

The Maya flourished between 250 and 900 CE (Classical period) in Northern Guatemala, the Yucatan Peninsula of today southern Mexico. Cacao, then pronounced “kakau” or “kakaw,” played an important social role for Mayans, even earning its own glyph.

For the Maya, chocolate held deep religious, societal, and economic significance, thus, it’s no surprise that chocolate production and usage was documented in various Mayan codices and vase engravings.

Cacao was a powerful substance that not only had “economic and gastronomic value […] but deep symbolic meaning as well.

Coe & Coe (1996)

In visual and written documents, cacao is presented in a sacred light – like gods being depicted as cacao trees or reborn as such. Specifically, this is evidenced in the Dresden Codex and Popul Vuh, which both feature cacao in direct connection with the gods.

This deep relationship with chocolate also manifested itself in the medicine, cacao was used to help cure ailments. The Chilam Balam, manuscript of Maya curative chants suggests that, after the magical singing, patients consumed a cacao-flavored concoction of herbs.

This remedies would heal skin rashes, fevers, and seizures. Anesthetic, anti-inflammatory, and strength related benefits were also known to the Mayas.

The curative use of Cocoa among the Mexica/Aztecs peoples

The Aztecs, from 1300-1521 AC, also believed cocoa had a religious significance. The Theobroma cacao tree was considered divine – a world tree between earth and heaven.

Beyond the ritualistic significance of cacao consumption to connect the Aztecs with the supernatural world, they also used chocolate for medical purposes.

Amongst Aztec doctors, or ‘ticitl‘, a combination of magic and plant-based remedies were used to combat ailments.

Cacao was found to be helpful, to treat diseases such as dysentery:

Five cacao beans would be combined with the bark of other trees, i.e. avocado, and provided to an individual following an incantation.

Above all, chocolate was believed to foster vitality and strength. Aztec soldiers marching off to battle were given chocolate beverages to fortify and sustain them.

Was Mesoamerican chocolate served hot or cold?

As Coe & Coe explain: “Although we do not know at what temperature the Classic [Maya] elite preferred their chocolate, given their culinary sophistication it is very likely that some drinks were cold, some were hot, and some were in between (the late pre-Conquest and Colonial Yucatec Maya favored hot chocolate, it seems).

And even if the Mexica drank it cold, heat must have been involved in its preparation – cacao paste in a jug of cold water just sits there, it doesn’t mix; as we all learn in school, solids dissolve faster and more effectively in hot liquids…”

Cacao/chocolate in medical treatment, a historical summary of positive claims and uses

From the article, Chocolate: Modern Science Investigates an Ancient Medicine:

Chocolate as Materia Medica: The curative use of cocoa in reports of the Colonial time

Throughout the Colonial era there is extensive documentary information from the Badianus Manuscript, the Princton Codex and the Florentine Codex, as we have excerpted from Louis Evan Grivettis article “Medicinal Chocolate in New Spain, Western Europe, and North America“, from the book “Chocolate: History, Culture and Heritage.”:

Bernardino de Sahagun

The Florentine Codex (1590 AD) contained an enormous list of medical uses for chocolate. It was written by priest Bernardino de Sahagun from Spain who lived and worked in New Spain for 60 years, collecting vital medicinal information regarding the use of chocolate for the body both internally and externally.

Sahagun states:

Chocolate (unmixed with other products; very bitter) was drunk by the Aztecs to treat stomach and intestinal complaints;

when combined with liquid extruded from the bark of the silk cotton tree (Castilla elastica), this beverage was used by traditional healers to cure infections.

In another recipe prescribed to reduce fever and prevent fainting, 8 – 10 cacao beans were ground along with dried maize kernels; this powder then was mixed with tlacoxochitl (Calliandra anomala) and the resulting beverage was drunk.

Patients with severe cough who expressed much phlegm were advised to drink infusions prepared from opossum tails, followed by a second medicinal beverage where chocolate was mixed with other herbs.

Preparations of tlatlapaltic root (an unknown, ill – tasting plant) were made palatable by mixing it with cacao, and the beverage was given to patients with fever.

In another medical recipe, bloody dysentery was treated using a mixture of chocolate blended with quinametli , identified as “ bones of ancient people (giants)”.

The spitting of blood recipe:

Those who spit up blood will heal by drinking cacao made with those aromatic spices called tlilxochitl, mecaxochitl, hueinacaztli, and with a certain type of chile called chiltecpin, which has been toasted well and mixed with ulli. And what has been just described can also be drunk [mixed] with wine, but it should not have ulli [mixed in]. Or [the patient] will drink the water [infusion] of the wood called tlapalezcuahuitl or the little bread roll that is called ezpatli, which is made from different herbs, mixing [the roll] and stirring it in the water.

Translation courtesy of García Garagarza 2023. Detail from a page of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún’s Historia general de las cosas de nueva España, Book 10, Folio 107v. Florentine Codex. Public domain, edited.

Increase in sexual appetite, fertility and longevity were other supposed benefits of the chocolate. Another benefit was seen in consuming cacao-tree bark that was thought to assists in reducing abdominal pain.

Externally, cacao was helpful in soothing burns, bronchitis and in disinfecting cuts. To facilitate childbirth, eating the fruit pulp of the cacao pod was prescribed. Even the leaves of the cacao tree where used as antiseptics for external wounds.

There are nearly 300 medicinal uses on de Sahagun’s list for the versatile cacao tree; however, he also added a warning label of sorts:

[Green cacao] makes one drunk, takes effect on one, makes one dizzy, confuses one, makes one sick, deranges one.

But when an ordinary amount is drunk, it gladdens one, refreshes one, consoles one, invigorates one.[sic]

Bernal Díaz del Castillo

As an eyewitness to the Conquest, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, described a banquet given by the Emperor Motecuhzoma II, where:

“…they brought him some cups of fine gold, with a certain drink made of cacao, which they said was for success with women;

but I saw that they brought more than 50 great jars of good cacao with its foam, and he drank of that; and the women served him drink very respectfully.”

In this passage, Díaz makes a statement about the aphrodisiacal property of cacao, an idea that would be reinforced by the studies of Francisco Hernández, the royal physician and naturalist to Philip II of Spain. Hernández was in Mexico from 1572 to 1577 in search of medicinal plants to add to the European pharmacopoeia.

He described more than three thousand species of New Spain. In that volume, Hernández provides a chocolate recipe, which he affirms excites the venereal appetite (Hernández 1959, v. 2:246, 305).

This recipe contains three plant products traditionally used to flavor Aztec chocolate beverages:

• the mecaxochitl flower (Piper ssp.), a relative of black pepper,
• the tlilxochitl bean (Vanilla planifolia Andrews), which is the famous vanilla, and
• the hueinacaztli flower (Cymbopetalum penduliflorum [Dunal] Baill.), which tastes spicy like black pepper.

According to Hernández, when cacao is mixed with these flavorings, “it gives an agreeable taste, is tonic, warms the stomach, perfumes the breath, combats poisons, and alleviates intestinal pains and colics”. Tlilxochitl, mecaxochitl and hueinacaztli mixed with chocolate was also described in medicinal uses on Sahaguns book.

Colmenero de Ledesma

In Colmenero de Ledesma’s 1631 account titled Curioso tratado de naturaleza y calidad del chocolate, which represented the first full-length printed account dedicated to chocolate, the surgeon celebrated the beverage and confectionery for its healthy and healing qualities.

“My desire,” he noted in the opening of the work, “is for the benefit and pleasure of the public, to describe the variety of uses and mixtures so that each may choose what suits their ailments.”

By the end of the seventeenth century, chocolate was popular across the Atlantic, particularly in the Europe’s imperial capitals and Atlantic port cities. 

However, in spite of its wide-spread use at the everyday level, its consumption was the subject of confusion and consternation by skeptical physicians and the learned classes. Colmnero de Ledesma noted that many Europeans of the era debated its qualities and application.  

“Some people say that it obstructs, others that it makes one fat. Some say that it soothes the stomach, while others that it heats and burns. And some say that they drink it every hour, even in the long-days of summer.  

I stand to defend this confection … against those that may suggest that this beverage is not good and healthy.”

Colmenero de Ledesma suggested that the consumption of chocolate was both salubrious and satiating.  In the Curioso tratado, he offered a four-part discourse on the qualities of the confection, noting its universal humoral attributes.  “Chocolate, as the Indians call it,” he wrote, managed to contain the four critical elements of heat, humidity, cold, and dryness.  

It could be oily and earthy, thick and airy, moist and dry, soft and hard. As a medicament, cacao, the “principal basis” of chocolate, served as an astringent and purgative.

The key to the varied uses of the confection, however, existed in the art of its preparation. By properly incorporating a wide variety of herbs and spices from the New World, chocolate could enliven appetites, elevate moods, and conserve one’s health.  

Poorly tempered concoctions could cause illness. Hinting at the Spanish disdain for the subjugated native populations of the colonies, he suggested that the chocolate could also release debilitating qualities, writing that

“[t]hose that mix maize, or paniço, in Chocolate produce harmfully release melancholy humors.”

Nevertheless, the artful combination of elements could produce a healthy and restorative beverage.  Colmenero de Ledesma also wrote a recipe for a Chocolate drink.

In A New Survey of the West-Indies of 1655, the English friar Thomas Gage celebrated the qualities of chocolate:

“Chocolate,” wrote the Dominican priest, was consumed in “all the West-India’s, but also in Spain, Italy, and Flanders, with approbation of many learned Doctors in Physick.”

“For myself,” Thomas Gage wrote, “I must say that used it twelve years constantly, drinking one cup in the morning, another yet before dinner between nine or ten of the clock, another within an hour or after dinner, and another between four or five in the afternoon.”

This four to five cup-a-day, twelve-year regimen of chocolate kept him “healthy, without any obstructions or oppilations, not knowing either ague or fever.”

An anonymous author publishes following erotic chocolate poem in The Vertues of Chocolate, East – India Drink. The pamphlet explained, that “by this pleasing drink health is preserved, sickness diverted.” It also claimed chocolate could cure kidney stones and urinary problems, and promised women that drinking chocolate would make them very attractive to the opposite sex.

The Vertues of Chocolate East-India Drink (Oxford: Henry Hall, 1660), one page.

Uses of cacao in Mesoamerica today

There are five major ways in which cacao and its related species have been used as medicines throughout Mesoamerica and northern South America. They are:

• used as stimulants or treatments for fatigue,
• for weight gain,
• as emollients (for softening or soothing dry or damaged skin),
• antiseptic (killing microbes around bites or wounds), and
  in certain species, as part of a snake bite remedy.

In addition, the high cocoa butter content of the seeds aided in weight gain for people suffering from consumption or emaciation a practice still used in Nahua, Mexico, but the effects would not be seen immediately.

Moreover, cacao decoctions in the Dominican Republic treat weakness owing to its stimulant and energy-rich properties.

Cacao has been used to treat various ailments from cracked lips and coughs to irritations of the scalp and other sensitive areas of the body. Although, cacao has a very low content of compounds known to soothe the skin (emollients), it does contain a number of compounds that might treat localized inflammation or infection.

So far twelve substances have been identified that act as pain killers (analgesics) and two that can produce a loss of sensation (anaesthetics).

In addition, there are 14 compounds that can kill or inhibit the growth of microbes (antiseptics) and another that has antibacterial properties (antibiotics).

The peoples of Ecuador and Colombia used certain Herrania species as snakebite remedies. The consistency of the species involved across different cultures suggests, that there may be some merit in these remedies.

Additionally, it has been found that Theobroma cacao contains 26 anti-inflammatories (to reduce the swollen bite), an astringent (to absorb or extract the toxins), 5 known vasoconstrictors (to narrow blood vessels) as well as the antiseptic properties.

All of these properties would be useful in a potential snakebite remedy. Since Theobroma and Herrania are closely related, it is could be reasonable to assume that the Herrania species used for snakebite treatments were effective remedies.

Other uses include:

• flowers used to treat a screw worm infection in the eye;
• roasted seeds mixed with roasted gum from Castilla elastica to treat dysentery;
• cacao seeds mixed with other plants was used to extract large splinters;
• The cacao pod (which contains the seeds and flesh of the fruit) was used as a cup or container and
• the wood from the cacao tree is used for carving and as firewood (across South America).

Theobromine

The name Theobromine is derived from Theobroma, the name of the genus of the cacao tree. The suffix -ine is given to alkaloids and other basic nitrogen-containing compounds. The name Theobromine is made up of the Greek roots theo and broma meaning “food of the gods”.

Theobromine, also called xantheose, is the principal alkaloid of the cacao plant and contributes to the bitter taste of dark chocolate. The benefits of this alkaloid potentially include having diuretic effects, widening arteries, boosting blood flow, lifting the mood, improving focus and concentration, and possibly having aphrodisiac effects.

It has little stimulant effect on the central nervous system, the effect of cocoa results from the caffeine that it contains rather than from the theobromine. In medication the compound was used as an aid in urination (diuretic), in the treatment of angina pectoris, as a vasodilator (a blood vessel widener for hypertension patients ), and as a heart stimulant. Its satisfactory amount of antioxidant effect is quite helpful for scavenging the free radicals, which are produced in the skin in the presence of UV light.

It is found in higher concentrations in dark chocolate but is still present in varying amounts in all chocolates derived from the cacao bean. The alkaloid is reported to be present in the range of 1–2.9% by weight. It is found in chocolate, as well as in tea (Camellia sinensis), some American hollies (yaupon and guayusa) and the kola nut.

Note: This article does not contain medical advice. Please ask a health practitioner before trying therapeutic products new to you.

If you do wish to experiment, we suggest doing further research.

With the destruction of the Aztecs’ capital in 1521, and the downfall of their empire, we enter an era in which chocolate-taking was transformed and creolized by the Spanish conquerors, and even new terminology invented, including the very word chocolate itself.

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