My days of being drunk are over, instead I’ll be rabbited!

Going forward I shall no longer be “tipsy”, “buzzed”, “drunk”, “wasted”, “plastered”, or “shit faced.” Am I giving up drinking? Hell No! I’m going to begin judging drunkenness like the Aztecs… in numbers of rabbits.

Uh rabbits?

I’ve been reading about wine and one of the last chapters of Mark Phillips’ book Swallow This contains quotes about wine, like this kick ass gem I’ll be using forever:

“There are no standards of taste in wine … Each man’s own taste is the standard, and a majority vote cannot decide for him or in any slightest degree affect the supremacy of his own standard”- Mark Twain

I love that and think it applies even more to beer than wine, but hey I love beer a lot more than I like wine so I’m biased. Two pages later it switches from quotes to trivia and drops this absurd nugget of knowledge:

The Aztec of Mexico used a “rabbit scale” to describe degrees of intoxication. It ranged from very mild intoxication (a few rabbits) to heavy drunkenness (400 rabbits).

Now you see where I’m going with this post. The Aztecs may have screwed the pooch on that whole apocalypse thing back in 2012 (or we screwed the interpretation of it) but this redeems them in my mind. Our culture’s adjectives for intoxication have stalled out and don’t seem to be evolving in new ways anymore, so lets get with the Aztecs and get “rabbited” (aka drunk).

Mono- Poly- Omnitheist

The other reason that I love this Aztec rabbit thing is because it’s not just about intoxication, it’s about Gods. Per The Complete Meso-America… And More blog the Aztecs actually worshiped rabbits and used them in all kinds of things, even a day of the “week” (roughly translated). Rabbits got linked with the Aztec pantheon of Gods from the Goddess Mayahuel who breast fed her children from a breast that produced Pulque instead of milk, and these children were rabbits. Again, all credit for that info goes to The Complete Meso-America blog.

I’ve been a big fan of the concept of plural Gods for a long time. I’m a lapsed Catholic who likes to call himself an omnitheist, as in I love all Gods equally and am my hedging bets on the after life. This isn’t a blog about religion so I’ll keep this to the beer gods (yes, there are more than 1 of them). Ninkasi is one of my favorite beer Goddesses as she’s the OG of beer deities hailing from ancient Sumer. Then there’s King Gambrinus the unofficial patron saint of beer who is basically the flemish version of Johnny Appleseed but with hops instead of apples! Now I’m adding the Aztecs and their Centzon Totochtin to that list. (Want to learn about more beer Gods? Check out this link)

¿Por qué? porque pulque

Before we get too silly, or perhaps too rabbited, lets circle back to pulque. What the hell is pulque?? According to Wikipedia it’s a thick milk colored liquid with a sour-yeasty taste made from fermented agave sap. That makes it a relative of mezcal and tequila, mezcal coming from the heart of agave and tequila from blue agave. While popular with Aztecs and many other Mexican cultures throughout the years it’s been pushed to the side by beer. It looks like there is only one distributor for it in this country and they likely don’t distribute to Ohio. Despite that I fully intend on trying some and if I do I’ll share my thoughts on it here. Now then, on to the silliness.

How rabbited are you?

Knowing that Aztecs considered 400 rabbits to be the most intoxicated someone could be I decided to define some other general levels of rabbit intoxication. Enjoy: