Terrified before dying? The ‘Aztec death whistle’ awakens aversion and symbolism in the brain

In 1999, the Mexican archaeologist Salvador Guilliem Arroyo unearthed the remains of dozens of victims sacrificed to Ehecatl, the wind god, in Tlatelolco, an ancient city near the Aztec capital of Tecnochtitlan (now Mexico City). One of them was a decapitated young man who “held a whistle with the face of death in both hands,” recalls Guilliem. The association of human sacrifices with the Aztec death whistle has fueled all kinds of fantasies, but there’s no denying that its sound is chilling. Now, a new study finds that its effect on the brain of those who hear it is also peculiar, which could provide clues about the use of these whistles in Aztec culture.

The Tlatelolco whistles were the first to be recovered in their archaeological context, although the first possible reference to them dates back to 1896. Over time, more pieces have appeared, and are these days distributed among different museums and collections, although counterfeits have also emerged.

The authentic ones, dating from between 1250 and 1521, are made of clay, measure between one and three inches and “in terms of their shape there is a narrow margin: they only represent the lord of the underworld Mictlantecuhtli, the owl or the fire serpent,” explains the musical archaeologist Arnd Adje Both, who has studied whistles extensively.

Both adds that these imitations, which are often circulated under the pretense of being originals, also falsify the internal configuration of the instrument and, therefore, its sound: “Some of them scream when you blow hard, but have a rather harsh sound when you blow more softly; others have a less aggressive sound.”

According to this expert, for the Aztecs whistles probably emulated the howling of the wind, which would explain why several of them have been found associated with Ehecatl.

Different from all known instruments

The internal configuration of the whistles, which is responsible for their characteristic sound, is unique in the world. “They are different in the sense that no other culture we know of built whistles with this specific architecture, not even in Aztec times,” says Sascha Frühholz, professor of cognitive and affective neuroscience at the University of Zurich. Specifically, he explains, they consist of two opposing acoustic chambers that produce turbulence in the air, resulting in the squeal-like sound. To what extent the Aztec craftsmen mastered the technique to design the sound effect they were looking for is something we do not know. “It could have been a process of trial and error,” suggests Frühholz.

What remains unknown is also the exact function of these whistles. Adje Both states that “the only archaeological evidence is their use in temple cult, human sacrifice to the wind god, and a possible ethnohistorical account of their use in human sacrifice in an Aztec merchant ceremony, also in temple cult.” Since Mictlantecuhtli was depicted on the whistles, it has been suggested that the sound may have prepared the sacrificed during the ritual for their descent into Mictlan, the underworld of the dead.

Thus, Frühholz and his collaborators write in their study, published in the journal Communications Psychology (of the Nature group), that the fifth level of Mictlan was swept by damaging and lethal winds, a scenario that the sound of the whistles could evoke. And although the idea circulates that warriors blew these instruments by the hundreds to intimidate the enemy, according to Adje Both “there is no ethnohistorical, iconographic or archaeological evidence that they were used in war; all the other stories that are read on the Internet are pure fiction without proof.”

A sound that triggers the imagination

In order to faithfully recreate the sound of the whistles and understand how they work, Frühholz’s team 3D-scanned two pieces from the collection of the Ethnological Museum of Berlin and commissioned Adje Both to reconstruct replicas, in collaboration with the ceramist and musician Osvaldo Padrón Pérez. Once the sounds and their acoustic qualities had been recorded, the scientists subjected groups of volunteers to a perceptual analysis and a neuroimaging study using functional magnetic resonance imaging, a technique that reveals the active regions of the brain when performing a task; in this case, listening to the whistles.

The volunteers perceived the sound of the whistles as a hybrid between natural and artificial, something evoking a human cry and causing them a feeling of aversion, alarm and fear. As for the neuroimaging study, Frühholz sums up that activation of brain mechanisms related not only to a strong primary affective reaction was observed, but also to more complex symbolic associations. “Many people in the experiment told us that the sound triggers the imagination because it has a certain mystical connotation,” explains the neuroscientist. He adds: “This mental processing at a more symbolic level could have been the intention of the Aztecs so that the sound would create a mental link with an entity, perhaps a god.”

However, although Frühholz stresses that all humans share the basic mechanisms involved, for Adje Both the conclusions could be guilty of Eurocentrism: “Unfortunately, the anthropological vision is largely missing; the physical effect on the brain would be identical for the Aztecs, but not necessarily its perception.”

Frühholz and his collaborators conclude that their results support the theory of ritual use in sacrifices, as opposed to the hypothesis of war or others. But did the victims of those bloody ceremonies leave this world terrified by the whistle of death or, on the contrary, were they comforted by the belief that this sound would guide them on their painful journey to the underworld? For Frühholz, the latter is possible. According to Guilliem, there are nuances: “Death in the pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican world had a very different conception to that of the mestizo New Spain, so I believe that it was not intended to instill fear.” Although he adds: “We will never know.”

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