Apokalipecac

With CNN reporting shocking stories of female students posting falling-down-drunk photos of themselves on Facebook, it may come as a surprise to find similar practices among the ancient Mayans, but for different reasons. I think.

Archaeologists discovered an intricately carved 1,400-year-old "death vase" along with parts of a human skeleton while excavating a small Mayan "palace" in northwestern Honduras.

The vase offers a window onto rituals of ancestor worship that included food offerings, chocolate enemas, and hallucinations induced by vomiting, experts say.

"The way to have contact, to communicate, with ancestors is to have visions," said Christian Wells, an anthropologist at the University of South Florida

"And you have a vision either by cutting yourself and bloodletting—which there's really no evidence for in this case—or by having some very powerful chocolate enema, or by drinking your brains out and throwing up."

"We think this beverage [in the vase] may have contained ipecac, which would have made the person who's drinking it throw up—a lot. Then, by throwing up a lot, they could've had visions that would have allowed them to talk with the ancestors."

OK. In college, whenever I drank my brains out until vomiting, I often talked with God. And several times with the police.

But it's the chocolate enema that caught my attention. No doubt a photo of that will appear on Facebook soon, too. Can't wait.

Of course we need to keep our perspective here. Wasn't it an old Mayan parable that said, "The enema of my enema is my friend?"


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