Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World Book

“If the party lacks chocolate, then it is worthless” - line from a 17th century poem

WHAT IS THIS BOOK ABOUT?
- Focusing on the Spanish Empire, Marcy Norton investigates how tobacco and chocolate became material and symbolic links to the pre-Hispanic past for colonized Indians and colonizing Europeans alike.

CHOCOLATE
- The origins of the human use of cacao are mysterious and contested...Inhabitants of the Gulf Coast (Olmec or their descendants) provided the loan word kakawa that appeared in Mayan languages as kakaw, Nahuatl as kakaw-alt (or cacautl), as well as similar variants in most other Mesoamerican languages.

- Moctezuma “ennobled”...tobacco and chocolate with the stature of his office and the sumptuous formality of the setting...The imputation of social and sacred qualities of tobacco and chocolate was a consequence of their appearance and reappearance in rites that expressed beliefs about the world

- Appreciation of psychotropic effects of chocolate were articulated in a Mexica proverb that declared chocolate: “gladdens one, refreshes one, consoles one, invigorates one.

- Chocolate also conjoined men and women uniting in matrimony, symbolizing the exchange of “blood flowing between intermarried families.”When they wanted to represent marriage in painted genealogies, Mixtec (Oaxaca) artists depicted vessels overflowing with foaming chocolate

- Chocolate enters this belief system as a metaphor, surrogate, and exchange item for blood.

- In Mayan iconography, cacao beans are visualized as hearts.

- The chocolate drink was the paramount offering, known as puyulcha, which translated means “sacrifice”

TOBACCO
- Mesoamericans did not distinguish between religious and functional use of tobacco. To the contrary, the multiple useful qualities attributed to pulverized tobacco reinforced its sacred status, while even the most quotidian uses of the tobacco were inscribed with ritual.

- In all of these cases it is impossible to separate tobacco’s utility...from the belief in its divine power to help fortune ensure a favorable outcome...healers would apply tobacco to the body of the ill person while summoning its sacred forces as a divine entity...used tobacco for these and many other cures, including treatments for eye and ear ailments, toothaches, throat and chest pains, open wounds, skin rashes, snakebites, and parasites.

- tobacco was associated with diplomacy, hospitality, and choreographed social ritual.

- Many Europeans mistook tobacco for henbane...For Europeans, henbane evoked sorcery and witchcraft, further implicating tobacco as an important agent in insidious rites.

- Tobacco did not present itself as a particularly lucrative trade good, so the colonizers mostly ignored it in the years after the conquest.

A LINK TO THE PAST
- For Mesoamerican Indians living under Spanish rule, tobacco and chocolate provided a link to past traditions that were under attack by the colonial regime or subject to atrophy with the disintegration of pre-Hispanic social structures....created hybrid forms of religion and culture that incorporated tobacco and chocolate.

TOBACCO BEGINS TO MAKE IN-ROADS IN EUROPE
- Mona reds was the first to develop a framework for exorcising, sanitizing, and civilizing tobacco by depicting how it could be transferred from a context of pagan idolatry to one of European medicine

- Lurking just below the source of Monardes’s discussion of tobacco was the question of whether Europeans who embraced the American herb became the pagan

- Monardes designated the medical consumption of tobacco as civilized and the social consumption of tobacco as barbarian.

- His time in Mexico left Hernandez convinced that it was impossible to separate the medicinal uses of American resources from the cultures that had discovered them.

- efforts to define what it meant to be “Spanish” while living at away from Spain, amid a majority of non-Spaniards. Tobacco and chocolate lay at the seams of these sometimes overlapping, sometimes clashing influences and anxieties.

SPAIN AS A CONDUIT
- The period between 1590 and 1610 corresponds to the transitional period in which tobacco and chocolate went from having a negligible presence in Iberia to having a firm social and commercial foothold on the peninsula.

- In general, Spaniards were quick to embrace New World substances that purported to heal;

FACTORS THAT HELPED
- factor that contributed to tobacco’s systematic entrance into the European market-the role of mariners in creating nascent demand among Europeans and in inaugurating the marketing of tobacco to their cohort and beyond

- sailors found tobacco a fortifier of bonds in their peripatetic lifestyle and likely, too, found it helped ease hunger, thirst, and fatigue, adversities integral to sailors’ precarious existence.

- Almost any odd corner could become a site of tobacco diffusion

- Chocolate-among the elite- belonged to the domestic space of the household. Unlike coffee, which became so identified with the “public sphere” of the coffeehouse, chocolate belonged to the private-though not individual -sphere.

- The most important mechanism for the transmission of tobacco and chocolate was social. It was less the goods themselves that passed from Indians to Europeans...but rather the sets of practices, habits, and tastes.

A CLASS SYSTEM
- And the elite Andalusians, like their forbears, associated smoking with courtly refinement and chewing tobacco with arduous exertion.

- Elite artists and writers delighted in depicting tobacco scenes as paradigmatic of boorish behavior and plebeian sociability.

EUROPEANS PUT THEIR OWN SPIN ON IT
- The most famous modification was the addition of sugar. Contrary to the popular view that the Spanish invented the idea of sweetening cacao, native Mexicans and Mayans already sweetened many of their cacao beverages with honey.

- Spanish colonists modified traditional Mesoamerican chocolate by adding or substitution spices esteemed in the Old World-cinnamon, black pepper, anise, rose, and sesame, Among others-in place of native flowers spice complex, achiote, and chili peppers.

LOVE AND CHOCOLATE
- In 17th century Spain, chocolate figured as a catalyst to libidinal desire and a requisite accoutrement to courtly love.

THE CROWN, PREDICTABLY, SENSES THERE IS MONEY TO BE GAINED
- Tobacco, in fact, would generate more wealth for the Crown than metallic bullion by the end of the seventeenth century, becoming “the greatest and most considerable jewel of the Royal Treasury” by 1684.

- The committee members recognized an important distinction between those taxes levied on products essential to life and those that are not. Accordingly, they were eager to tax cacao, and so approved it “because it falls on a luxury good and is not necessary and is free of other taxes.”

- This basis for “sin taxes” was hardly a new idea, but the millones agreement did more than tax tobacco and chocolate, it also included a provision that allowed the Crown to control the sale of tobacco throughout the kingdom through a royal monopoly.

ALSO PREDICTABLY, CONTRABAND ENTERS THE SCENE
- But the biggest impediment to the Crown’s ability to maximize rents from this monopoly was the rife contraband and smuggling that took place...compelled by the huge gap between “market” and “monopoly” prices.

- The monopoly led consumers and vendors alike to see the state and tobacco as inextricably linked

CHOCOLATE AND TOBACCO CAUSE PROBLEMS FOR CATHOLICS
- the theological debates concerning tobacco in 17th century Spain coalesced around two major areas-whether its consumption interfered with Communion and whether its use by holy people or in holy places constituted sacrilege

- The main controversy was whether or nor chocolate drinking constituted a violation of the ecclesiastical fast

- Medical and theological experts demystified tobacco and chocolate in two ways. They accounted for the substances’ purported effects by the natural working of the body. Or they characterized the effects as the delusional fantasies of people under the sway of a powerful vice.

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FACTOIDS
- Chocolate is not, strictly speaking, a caffeinated substance since it contains only trace amounts of caffeine, but it is rich in caffeine’s molecular relative, theobromine.

- Syncretism, meaning an amalgamation of beliefs and practices emerging from different cultural traditions

- The Mexica (as the Aztecs are properly known)

- In 1535, tobacco- or rather “tobaco”-first appeared in print

- the words hurricane and hammock, as well as tobacco, that derive from the Taino language

- zigarillo, which derived from the highland Mayan word sikar (cigr or tobacco)

HAHA
- Cardenas particularly identified women as guilty of improper chocolate consumption practices

- “In Spain it [was] held that the greatest misfortune that can befall a man i to be without Chocolate.”

- To death and time, I challenge
And to both I make a bet
That there is no man in the world
Who would kill himself
If once he had drank chocolate

BONUS
- Author interviewed:

- History of chocolate (TED-Ed):