The Aztec Midwife Talked to Babies Before They Were Born — And What She Said Will Stay With You.

The Aztec Midwife Talked to Babies Before They Were Born — And What She Said Will Stay With You. Three things you need to know before this story begins. First: the Aztec midwife — the ticitl — talked to the unborn child before it arrived, addressing it with a formal speech that acknowledged its courage in making the journey from the divine world into the human one. When the baby was born, she gave it another speech — a long, carefully composed address that told the child what kind of world it was entering, what kind of suffering it would face, and what it was expected to do with the time it had. If the baby was a girl, she was told that her place was in the house, at the hearth and the grinding stone and the loom, and that she had come into a world of toil and weariness. These speeches survive. They are some of the most extraordinary documents about women's lives that any civilization has ever left behind. Second: the market of Tlatelolco — the great commercial center of the Aztec world — was described by Hernán Cortés himself as larger and more orderly than any market he had seen in Spain. The people who ran most of the daily commerce of this market — the food sellers, the cloth sellers, the medicine sellers, the cacao sellers who were simultaneously selling food and currency — were, to a significant degree, women whose economic knowledge and commercial skill was as sophisticated as any professional class in the Aztec world. Third: the women of the calmecac — the temple compounds that housed the Aztec priestesses — held a body of sacred knowledge about the ritual calendar, the ceremonial chants, the weaving of the divine offerings, and the management of the sacred fires, that the Spanish missionaries collected for the purpose of suppressing it and that we are still recovering five centuries later. Tonight we spend three and a half hours inside the daily life of the women who built and sustained one of the most sophisticated civilizations in the pre-Columbian Americas. We follow the commoner woman from the pre-dawn grinding of corn through the morning market to the evening weaving by the hearth fire. We spend extended time with the ticitl and her extraordinary practice — her prenatal consultations, her management of the birth itself, the remarkable speeches she delivered to newborns that acknowledged their arrival as a cosmological event. We go into the calmecac to understand what the female religious practitioners actually did in the temples. We meet the noble women managing the elaborate households of the Aztec elite. We read the huehuetlahtolli — the formal speeches that fathers and mothers gave their daughters before marriage — and hear what the Aztec world wanted its women to know. And we end in 1521, with the fall of Tenochtitlan, and trace what survived. The tortilla is still round. The market women are still there. The midwife still speaks to the newborn. Dim your lights. The fires on the Templo Mayor are long extinguished. But the grinding begins before dawn, as it always has. We're here every night — new story, same pace, lights always low. ________________________________________ Tags: Aztec women, Aztec history, Tenochtitlan, Aztec midwife, ticitl, Tlatelolco market, Aztec daily life, pre-Columbian history, Aztec Empire, Mesoamerican history, Aztec religion, women's history, sleep history podcast, history for sleep, Sleepless Historian style, indigenous history, Nahuatl, Florentine Codex, Aztec culture, Mexico history, huehuetlahtolli, Aztec civilization, chinampa, Aztec weaving, pre-colonial Mexico