Cacao mythology

Many ancient American myths surround the origin of the cacao tree and how cacao or chocolate came into the world. Cacao comes from "cacahuatl" and can be translated as "cacao bean"; chocolate comes from "xocóatl" and means "bitter water". Both terms are Aztec and come from the Nahuatl language - a language that is still spoken by about 1.5 million people in Central America today.

A myth tells how Quetzalcoatl ("luminous tail-feathered serpent"), a deity of the Toltecs, Aztecs and Maya, lost his beloved princess in an enemy attack. She was killed because she did not want to betray to the enemy a treasure that Quetzalcoatl had entrusted to her. Her blood soaked and fertilized the land where she died. Quetzalcoatl gave birth there to the cacao tree, whose fruit was bitter like the suffering his wife had endured for love, strong like the virtue she had shown in adversity, and reddish like the blood she had shed.

A myth that already on the linguistic level impressively explains the originally bitter taste of chocolate, the blood-red color of the cacao fruit and the proximity of Theobrama cacao to the pre-Columbian gods. The myth also tells us about the boundless love - beyond death & represented in the cacao. ...