Sports, Games, and Gambling in the Aztec World

By Martin Wasserman

Sports, Games, and Gambling in the Aztec World consists of a series of original essays written by Professor Wasserman over a twenty-year period. These essays review and discuss the psychological dynamics involved in the three major Aztec sports and games: patolli (the dice game), tlachtli (the ball game), and Volador (the game of vertigo). In addition, as part of the collection, there is a creative piece showing that poetry, although not considered a game or sport, was viewed by an honored king in the Aztec worldNezahualcoyotl or Hungry Coyoteas a human gamble with death itself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 7, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543413328

Martin Wasserman

Martin Wasserman, the creator of this book, is a Professor Emeritus at SUNY Adirondack, a college in the State University of New York system where he taught for thirty-six years. During his career he published over thirty journal articles and three books. One of those works, Kafka Kaleidoscope, was chosen as a “Best Book” by the Small Press Review in 1999. Professor Wasserman’s two most recent works are an original poetry piece entitled Kafka, Rilke, Nadel: Three German Writers Pulling Me Toward the East and a poetry translation called What There Is, As It Is: The Epigrammatic Poems of Ludwig Feuerbach.

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Copyright © 2017 by Martin Wasserman.

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Rev. date: 04/19/2017

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CONTENTS

Aztec Games And Gambling: An Introduction

Alcohol, No! Gambling, Yes:

A Matter Of Survival In Aztec Society

Transcending Ethnocentrism In Sports Research:

The Case Of Aztec Player Gambling

Myth And Cultus In Sport: The Case Of The Aztec Flying Game

Poetry As A Human Gamble: The Case Of Nezahualcoyotl

AZTEC GAMES AND GAMBLING: AN INTRODUCTION

I N PRE-CORTESIAN MEXICAN cultures, the practice of gambling on games of chance and skill was a popular activity. Soustelle goes so far as to say that the Aztecs were probably addicted to gambling. The prevalence of gambling may indicate that it served an adaptive function in Aztec society, because it fostered the personal qualities of confidence and risk-taking necessary for individuals to flourish as military men and entrepreneurs.

The game of chance on which players bet on was called patolli by the Aztecs. It was a dice game played on a crossed grid of fifty-two squares drawn on a large mat or on the floor. Two persons could play against each other, or four individuals might compete by forming two-person teams. When two individuals played as a team, one was designated as the dice thrower and the other as the scorekeeper. Each side had six little pebbles that served as markers; one set was colored blue, the other red. The game drew its name from the larger flat beans, called patoles, that were used as dice. Each patole was marked on one side with points that represented numbers, and when four were cast together, they indicated how many squares a player was permitted to move his pebble. The goal of the competition was for an individual, or a team, to be the first to get all six pebbles completely through the course of squares along the arms of the cross.

According to Fray Diego Duran, patolli players were given to the vice of gambling. Some of the items wagered in the game were jewels, precious stones, as well as a gambler’s own home and his wife’s personal jewelry. When a gambler had lost everything, he might even go so far as to stake himself at a set price and, if he lost, the gambler would then become his victor’s slave (1971: 301).

Like most forms of entertainment in ancient Mexico, patolli appears to have had a hidden meaning. Soustelle claims that the fifty-two squares on the mat represented the number of years that were present in the combined divinatory and solar cycles; at the end of this time span, a final cataclysmic event might occur that would destroy all life in the universe. A patolli victory, therefore, symbolized the continuation of life, whereas a defeat represented the anticipated end of the