Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff, Josh, Chuck, Jerry,
Speaker 1: and for Dave, this is short stuff stand back.
Speaker 2: That's right about the as Tech death whistle. We talked
Speaker 2: a lot about Mexico City one of our favorite places
Speaker 2: to visit. And if you go to Mexico City, you
Speaker 2: should know that you are a lot of times standing
Speaker 2: on the ruins of ancient burial temples as tech temples,
Speaker 2: and they have excavated those over the years here and there.
Speaker 2: And in the late nineties they excavated a temple dedicated
Speaker 2: to the az Tech win God, and they uncovered the
Speaker 2: remains of a twenty year old male that was beheaded,
Speaker 2: squatting at the base of the stairway and holding a
Speaker 2: couple of musical instruments.
Speaker 1: Yeah, as an aside, I just wanted to say, I
Speaker 1: think I've said it before, the Anthropological Museum in Mexico
Speaker 1: City is world class.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's on my list. It'll happen next time, for sure.
Speaker 1: It's great for that very reason, because there's so many
Speaker 1: ruins just built right over and preserved in that way.
Speaker 1: I mean, think about it. Mexico City's one of the
Speaker 1: most densely populated cities on the planet and people were
Speaker 1: walking over a beheaded skeleton every day until the late
Speaker 1: nineties when they excavated it. You know, yeah, so yeah,
Speaker 1: you said that boy. Did you say he was holding
Speaker 1: whistles or did you just say he was holding something?
Speaker 2: I said musical instruments, but you yeah, there you go.
Speaker 2: They're whistles.
Speaker 1: Whistles. I mean you could have guessed that from the title, right, probably,
Speaker 1: but these whistles are special whistles. First of all, they're
Speaker 1: kind of tiny, but if you look closely, they had
Speaker 1: a skull engraved on them. And what they think this
Speaker 1: whole thing represents is the kind of union or combination
Speaker 1: between he Coddle and mclonticulty. These are two gods. Miclonticulty
Speaker 1: is the Aztec god of the underworld and death. Hey,
Speaker 1: Coddle is the Aztec win god. And you put them together,
Speaker 1: you got two very powerful gods. And they think that's
Speaker 1: what these death whistles that the guy was holding symbolized.
Speaker 2: Nice job in those pronunciations.
Speaker 1: I really looked it up. Yeah, and dude, you should
Speaker 1: see how many mispronounced words there are that they just
Speaker 1: sound so confident. There's one, uh, there's a festival called
Speaker 1: push coddle, toush coddle, t O x c A t L.
Speaker 1: You have no idea how many like how's it pronounced? Videos?
Speaker 1: Say tx coddle, it's not tox coddle.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's pretty disappointing. You're not stuff out there.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: And if you're not sure how to pronounce something, don't
Speaker 1: make a video telling other people how to pronounce something.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, we mispronounced stuff on this show, worldwide show,
Speaker 2: but we don't tell people we're pronouncing it right exactly.
Speaker 1: This isn't like how pronunciation works.
Speaker 2: Come on, So this is the Aztec death whistle. Those
Speaker 2: two whistles this guy had. If you do a little research,
Speaker 2: you're probably going to see stuff about how they were
Speaker 2: used to tear enemies in battle, like they all play
Speaker 2: them at once. But what we think we've come down to,
Speaker 2: thanks to you know, the study of a lot of people,
Speaker 2: but especially this one guy, Arned Both, who is a
Speaker 2: music archaeologist, is that these things probably were a little
Speaker 2: more ceremonial, right, and maybe used to help guide the
Speaker 2: spirit in the afterlife. So this dude, I don't know
Speaker 2: if he's a doctor or not, but Both is his name,
Speaker 2: Like I said, it's very cool. He's examined ancient musical
Speaker 2: instruments and artifacts, tries to in a lot of cases
Speaker 2: rebuild them and take some good guesses on what they
Speaker 2: were used for.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which is I'm sure way harder than you would think.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So these those two death whistles were excavated in the
Speaker 1: late nineties, I think in just a couple of years
Speaker 1: later in the aughts. But did you say booth, I
Speaker 1: said both both. He was the first person to actually
Speaker 1: play them, these things that were hundreds and hundreds of
Speaker 1: years old, that a skeleton had been holding for god
Speaker 1: knows how long, well hundreds of years, and he apparently didn't.
Speaker 1: He was like, these they suck, These are terrible death whistles.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was a little underwhelming. It didn't make the big,
Speaker 2: frightening noise they might have expected. So he did CT
Speaker 2: scans on them, rebuilt them larger, like, you know, exact replicas,
Speaker 2: and he found that they were an air spring whistle.
Speaker 2: So the Mayans had come up with these in seven
Speaker 2: to eight hundred CE, and you blow air through this
Speaker 2: intake tube and it reacts with the spring of air
Speaker 2: inside this chamber and distorts the sound. Then you can
Speaker 2: cup your hand over the bottom like a lot of
Speaker 2: wind instruments and change the tone and stuff, but it's
Speaker 2: completely its own thing. It's not like any Western any
Speaker 2: other Western wind instrument.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they were only made in pre Columbian America. That's
Speaker 1: they are very specific. And spring in this case is
Speaker 1: not like a coiled spring. It's like a spring of
Speaker 1: water that you get delicious water from. Right, That's right. So,
Speaker 1: like I said, there's a big wait, We'll just take a.
Speaker 3: Break, how about that. Yeah, we'll be right back, okay, Chuck.
Speaker 1: So I said, there's a big, strong connection, as I
Speaker 1: was saying before before we broke between the wind god
Speaker 1: mclonticulty and a caddal and I wasn't lying. There's written
Speaker 1: proof that shows that I'm correct.
Speaker 2: That's right. It's written in a pre Columbian document called
Speaker 2: the Codex Borgia, and it is a manuscript. It's illustrated,
Speaker 2: and it shows. It's got a lot of stuff in there.
Speaker 2: It's got history, it's got like some of the things
Speaker 2: that were studying, like botany, the stars, and it's got
Speaker 2: a great, big, comprehensive list of their pantheon of gods.
Speaker 1: And the top notch mushroom soup casserole recipe.
Speaker 2: It might. For all I know, I can't tell anymore.
Speaker 1: So Miquelon Ticulti and a Coddal I just like saying
Speaker 1: them now, I know now that I can say them correctly.
Speaker 1: They're back to back, arms crossed like local anchored.
Speaker 2: Did they invent that?
Speaker 1: I think so? God both looking at the at you,
Speaker 1: the viewer, almost with a sassy kind of look on
Speaker 1: their face. Sure, and they are guarding the underworld together.
Speaker 1: So these these guys are definitely connected in the Aztec pantheon,
Speaker 1: which goes to support That's what those death whistles are
Speaker 1: kind of symbolizing, these two gods together that in one
Speaker 1: interpretation at least, you could say is life and death.
Speaker 1: The god of life the god of death.
Speaker 2: That's right, So I mentioned it may be used to
Speaker 2: kind of guide you through the spirit world in that
Speaker 2: Aztec tradition, when someone dies, it's a pretty perilous route
Speaker 2: to get to the underworld takes nine years, yeah, nine years,
Speaker 2: And there's all kinds of rituals that people in the
Speaker 2: living world do to urge them on to give them strength.
Speaker 2: One example here in this case it's pretty appropriate, is
Speaker 2: the dead cross a large field being whipped by a wind,
Speaker 2: like a really fierce wind. And in that book, in
Speaker 2: the Codex Borgia, those winds are represented by blades, by
Speaker 2: obsidian blades, and those were the blades that they used
Speaker 2: to make sacrifices. You go back to this temple site
Speaker 2: where they found these whistles, and not only did they
Speaker 2: have those whistles, but there was a ceramic bowl there
Speaker 2: as well that had obsidian blades next to the body
Speaker 2: of this guy.
Speaker 1: And a little sign that said take one, leave one.
Speaker 1: So this, I mean, all of this together just basically
Speaker 1: shows this is what those death whistles almost certainly were.
Speaker 1: And the reason that we're not just us, but both
Speaker 1: in particular Booth or both the music archaeologists, is going
Speaker 1: to all this trouble is because we don't know exactly
Speaker 1: what these things were used for, how they were used,
Speaker 1: what they were meant to sound like. We just don't know.
Speaker 1: So you have to piece together all this disparate information
Speaker 1: to kind of come together. And what it ultimately is
Speaker 1: laying a pretty good case for is that these were
Speaker 1: ritual musical instruments used in a specific ritual, probably like
Speaker 1: you said, to help departed souls across that field, that
Speaker 1: one level of the underworld.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the wind.
Speaker 1: And then also in that festival, I talked about touch
Speaker 1: coddle to honor the god tit's ketlepoca. That one is
Speaker 1: pronounced like it looks.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So in nineteen thirteen there was a folklorus named
Speaker 2: Lewis Spence Nice who wrote really nailed that one who
Speaker 2: wrote Myths of Mexico and Peru, and he described this
Speaker 2: festival and this is sort of the key part as
Speaker 2: far as we're concerned. On the day of this festival,
Speaker 2: a youth was slain YadA, YadA YadA. He carried also
Speaker 2: the whistle symbolical of the deity lord of the night wind,
Speaker 2: and made with it a noise such as the weird
Speaker 2: wind of night makes when it hurries through the streets.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it does. I mean, there's videos online of
Speaker 1: people playing these, like indigenous musicians playing death whistles, and
Speaker 1: you can kind of get the idea of like, oh, okay,
Speaker 1: this kind of does sound like an agonized scream. There's
Speaker 1: a point to be made though that these replica death whistles,
Speaker 1: especially you know, made by both they're larger than the
Speaker 1: regular size, so just by that alone means they're not
Speaker 1: going to sound like the other ones will. So I
Speaker 1: think what both kind of concluded is that he's just
Speaker 1: he's not instructed in how to play these original small
Speaker 1: death whistles that the sacrifice guy was was holding, yeah,
Speaker 1: and that he just can't do it. He never had
Speaker 1: to do. He looked around at the crowd.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah. The notion that they were maybe used in battle.
Speaker 2: They definitely did stuff like that with obviously drums, but
Speaker 2: also blowing into conkshells like the Waponi wu getting together.
Speaker 2: Maybe they're communicating with each other. Maybe they're just again
Speaker 2: trying to like scare their enemies. But when they asked
Speaker 2: both like well what about this death whistle, he was
Speaker 2: like have you seen these things? He's like, this is
Speaker 2: the size of my pinky. Yeah, it's like this didn't
Speaker 2: get to scare even three hundred of these didn't gonna
Speaker 2: scare anybody.
Speaker 1: No, but some drums will in a conk shell, well
Speaker 1: for sure.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so that's it.
Speaker 1: Death whistles probably not used in battle, but almost certainly
Speaker 1: used in rituals that ended in someone's beheading. That's right,
Speaker 1: Chuck said, that's right. I think that means short stuff
Speaker 1: is it?
Speaker 2: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
Speaker 2: more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 2: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.