February 11, 2026 • 11 mins
In the late 90s, a strange musical instrument was excavated under the streets of CDMX. Listen in to learn all about the Aztec Death Whistle.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff, Josh, Chuck, Jerry,
and for Dave, this is short stuff stand back.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
That's right about the as Tech death whistle. We talked
a lot about Mexico City one of our favorite places
to visit. And if you go to Mexico City, you
should know that you are a lot of times standing
on the ruins of ancient burial temples as tech temples,
and they have excavated those over the years here and there.
And in the late nineties they excavated a temple dedicated
(00:33):
to the az Tech win God, and they uncovered the
remains of a twenty year old male that was beheaded,
squatting at the base of the stairway and holding a
couple of musical instruments.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
Yeah, as an aside, I just wanted to say, I
think I've said it before, the Anthropological Museum in Mexico
City is world class.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Yeah, that's on my list. It'll happen next time, for sure.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
It's great for that very reason, because there's so many
ruins just built right over and preserved in that way.
I mean, think about it. Mexico City's one of the
most densely populated cities on the planet and people were
walking over a beheaded skeleton every day until the late
nineties when they excavated it. You know, yeah, so yeah,
you said that boy. Did you say he was holding
whistles or did you just say he was holding something?
Speaker 2 (01:21):
I said musical instruments, but you yeah, there you go.
They're whistles.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Whistles. I mean you could have guessed that from the title, right, probably,
but these whistles are special whistles. First of all, they're
kind of tiny, but if you look closely, they had
a skull engraved on them. And what they think this
whole thing represents is the kind of union or combination
between he Coddle and mclonticulty. These are two gods. Miclonticulty
(01:48):
is the Aztec god of the underworld and death. Hey,
Coddle is the Aztec win god. And you put them together,
you got two very powerful gods. And they think that's
what these death whistles that the guy was holding symbolized.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Nice job in those pronunciations.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
I really looked it up. Yeah, and dude, you should
see how many mispronounced words there are that they just
sound so confident. There's one, uh, there's a festival called
push coddle, toush coddle, t O x c A t L.
You have no idea how many like how's it pronounced? Videos?
(02:25):
Say tx coddle, it's not tox coddle.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Yeah, it's pretty disappointing. You're not stuff out there.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
And if you're not sure how to pronounce something, don't
make a video telling other people how to pronounce something.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Yeah. I mean, we mispronounced stuff on this show, worldwide show,
but we don't tell people we're pronouncing it right exactly.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
This isn't like how pronunciation works.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Come on, So this is the Aztec death whistle. Those
two whistles this guy had. If you do a little research,
you're probably going to see stuff about how they were
used to tear enemies in battle, like they all play
them at once. But what we think we've come down to,
thanks to you know, the study of a lot of people,
but especially this one guy, Arned Both, who is a
(03:11):
music archaeologist, is that these things probably were a little
more ceremonial, right, and maybe used to help guide the
spirit in the afterlife. So this dude, I don't know
if he's a doctor or not, but Both is his name,
Like I said, it's very cool. He's examined ancient musical
instruments and artifacts, tries to in a lot of cases
(03:35):
rebuild them and take some good guesses on what they
were used for.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
Yeah, which is I'm sure way harder than you would think.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
So these those two death whistles were excavated in the
late nineties, I think in just a couple of years
later in the aughts. But did you say booth, I
said both both. He was the first person to actually
play them, these things that were hundreds and hundreds of
years old, that a skeleton had been holding for god
(04:05):
knows how long, well hundreds of years, and he apparently didn't.
He was like, these they suck, These are terrible death whistles.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
Yeah, it was a little underwhelming. It didn't make the big,
frightening noise they might have expected. So he did CT
scans on them, rebuilt them larger, like, you know, exact replicas,
and he found that they were an air spring whistle.
So the Mayans had come up with these in seven
to eight hundred CE, and you blow air through this
(04:34):
intake tube and it reacts with the spring of air
inside this chamber and distorts the sound. Then you can
cup your hand over the bottom like a lot of
wind instruments and change the tone and stuff, but it's
completely its own thing. It's not like any Western any
other Western wind instrument.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
Yeah, they were only made in pre Columbian America. That's
they are very specific. And spring in this case is
not like a coiled spring. It's like a spring of
water that you get delicious water from. Right, That's right. So,
like I said, there's a big wait, We'll just take a.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
Break, how about that. Yeah, we'll be right back, okay, Chuck.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
So I said, there's a big, strong connection, as I
was saying before before we broke between the wind god
mclonticulty and a caddal and I wasn't lying. There's written
proof that shows that I'm correct.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
That's right. It's written in a pre Columbian document called
the Codex Borgia, and it is a manuscript. It's illustrated,
and it shows. It's got a lot of stuff in there.
It's got history, it's got like some of the things
that were studying, like botany, the stars, and it's got
a great, big, comprehensive list of their pantheon of gods.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
And the top notch mushroom soup casserole recipe.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
It might. For all I know, I can't tell anymore.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
So Miquelon Ticulti and a Coddal I just like saying
them now, I know now that I can say them correctly.
They're back to back, arms crossed like local anchored.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
Did they invent that?
Speaker 1 (06:42):
I think so? God both looking at the at you,
the viewer, almost with a sassy kind of look on
their face. Sure, and they are guarding the underworld together.
So these these guys are definitely connected in the Aztec pantheon,
which goes to support That's what those death whistles are
kind of symbolizing, these two gods together that in one
(07:07):
interpretation at least, you could say is life and death.
The god of life the god of death.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
That's right, So I mentioned it may be used to
kind of guide you through the spirit world in that
Aztec tradition, when someone dies, it's a pretty perilous route
to get to the underworld takes nine years, yeah, nine years,
And there's all kinds of rituals that people in the
living world do to urge them on to give them strength.
(07:35):
One example here in this case it's pretty appropriate, is
the dead cross a large field being whipped by a wind,
like a really fierce wind. And in that book, in
the Codex Borgia, those winds are represented by blades, by
obsidian blades, and those were the blades that they used
to make sacrifices. You go back to this temple site
(07:57):
where they found these whistles, and not only did they
have those whistles, but there was a ceramic bowl there
as well that had obsidian blades next to the body
of this guy.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
And a little sign that said take one, leave one.
So this, I mean, all of this together just basically
shows this is what those death whistles almost certainly were.
And the reason that we're not just us, but both
in particular Booth or both the music archaeologists, is going
to all this trouble is because we don't know exactly
(08:28):
what these things were used for, how they were used,
what they were meant to sound like. We just don't know.
So you have to piece together all this disparate information
to kind of come together. And what it ultimately is
laying a pretty good case for is that these were
ritual musical instruments used in a specific ritual, probably like
(08:51):
you said, to help departed souls across that field, that
one level of the underworld.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Yeah, the wind.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
And then also in that festival, I talked about touch
coddle to honor the god tit's ketlepoca. That one is
pronounced like it looks.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
Yeah. So in nineteen thirteen there was a folklorus named
Lewis Spence Nice who wrote really nailed that one who
wrote Myths of Mexico and Peru, and he described this
festival and this is sort of the key part as
far as we're concerned. On the day of this festival,
a youth was slain YadA, YadA YadA. He carried also
(09:29):
the whistle symbolical of the deity lord of the night wind,
and made with it a noise such as the weird
wind of night makes when it hurries through the streets.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
Yeah, and it does. I mean, there's videos online of
people playing these, like indigenous musicians playing death whistles, and
you can kind of get the idea of like, oh, okay,
this kind of does sound like an agonized scream. There's
a point to be made though that these replica death whistles,
especially you know, made by both they're larger than the
(10:03):
regular size, so just by that alone means they're not
going to sound like the other ones will. So I
think what both kind of concluded is that he's just
he's not instructed in how to play these original small
death whistles that the sacrifice guy was was holding, yeah,
and that he just can't do it. He never had
(10:24):
to do. He looked around at the crowd.
Speaker 3 (10:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Yeah. The notion that they were maybe used in battle.
They definitely did stuff like that with obviously drums, but
also blowing into conkshells like the Waponi wu getting together.
Maybe they're communicating with each other. Maybe they're just again
trying to like scare their enemies. But when they asked
both like well what about this death whistle, he was
like have you seen these things? He's like, this is
(10:50):
the size of my pinky. Yeah, it's like this didn't
get to scare even three hundred of these didn't gonna
scare anybody.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
No, but some drums will in a conk shell, well
for sure.
Speaker 3 (10:58):
Yeah, so that's it.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Death whistles probably not used in battle, but almost certainly
used in rituals that ended in someone's beheading. That's right,
Chuck said, that's right. I think that means short stuff
is it?
Speaker 2 (11:15):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff, Josh, Chuck, Jerry,
and for Dave, this is short stuff stand back.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
That's right about the as Tech death whistle. We talked
a lot about Mexico City one of our favorite places
to visit. And if you go to Mexico City, you
should know that you are a lot of times standing
on the ruins of ancient burial temples as tech temples,
and they have excavated those over the years here and there.
And in the late nineties they excavated a temple dedicated
(00:33):
to the az Tech win God, and they uncovered the
remains of a twenty year old male that was beheaded,
squatting at the base of the stairway and holding a
couple of musical instruments.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
Yeah, as an aside, I just wanted to say, I
think I've said it before, the Anthropological Museum in Mexico
City is world class.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Yeah, that's on my list. It'll happen next time, for sure.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
It's great for that very reason, because there's so many
ruins just built right over and preserved in that way.
I mean, think about it. Mexico City's one of the
most densely populated cities on the planet and people were
walking over a beheaded skeleton every day until the late
nineties when they excavated it. You know, yeah, so yeah,
you said that boy. Did you say he was holding
whistles or did you just say he was holding something?
Speaker 2 (01:21):
I said musical instruments, but you yeah, there you go.
They're whistles.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Whistles. I mean you could have guessed that from the title, right, probably,
but these whistles are special whistles. First of all, they're
kind of tiny, but if you look closely, they had
a skull engraved on them. And what they think this
whole thing represents is the kind of union or combination
between he Coddle and mclonticulty. These are two gods. Miclonticulty
(01:48):
is the Aztec god of the underworld and death. Hey,
Coddle is the Aztec win god. And you put them together,
you got two very powerful gods. And they think that's
what these death whistles that the guy was holding symbolized.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Nice job in those pronunciations.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
I really looked it up. Yeah, and dude, you should
see how many mispronounced words there are that they just
sound so confident. There's one, uh, there's a festival called
push coddle, toush coddle, t O x c A t L.
You have no idea how many like how's it pronounced? Videos?
(02:25):
Say tx coddle, it's not tox coddle.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Yeah, it's pretty disappointing. You're not stuff out there.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
And if you're not sure how to pronounce something, don't
make a video telling other people how to pronounce something.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Yeah. I mean, we mispronounced stuff on this show, worldwide show,
but we don't tell people we're pronouncing it right exactly.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
This isn't like how pronunciation works.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Come on, So this is the Aztec death whistle. Those
two whistles this guy had. If you do a little research,
you're probably going to see stuff about how they were
used to tear enemies in battle, like they all play
them at once. But what we think we've come down to,
thanks to you know, the study of a lot of people,
but especially this one guy, Arned Both, who is a
(03:11):
music archaeologist, is that these things probably were a little
more ceremonial, right, and maybe used to help guide the
spirit in the afterlife. So this dude, I don't know
if he's a doctor or not, but Both is his name,
Like I said, it's very cool. He's examined ancient musical
instruments and artifacts, tries to in a lot of cases
(03:35):
rebuild them and take some good guesses on what they
were used for.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
Yeah, which is I'm sure way harder than you would think.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
So these those two death whistles were excavated in the
late nineties, I think in just a couple of years
later in the aughts. But did you say booth, I
said both both. He was the first person to actually
play them, these things that were hundreds and hundreds of
years old, that a skeleton had been holding for god
(04:05):
knows how long, well hundreds of years, and he apparently didn't.
He was like, these they suck, These are terrible death whistles.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
Yeah, it was a little underwhelming. It didn't make the big,
frightening noise they might have expected. So he did CT
scans on them, rebuilt them larger, like, you know, exact replicas,
and he found that they were an air spring whistle.
So the Mayans had come up with these in seven
to eight hundred CE, and you blow air through this
(04:34):
intake tube and it reacts with the spring of air
inside this chamber and distorts the sound. Then you can
cup your hand over the bottom like a lot of
wind instruments and change the tone and stuff, but it's
completely its own thing. It's not like any Western any
other Western wind instrument.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
Yeah, they were only made in pre Columbian America. That's
they are very specific. And spring in this case is
not like a coiled spring. It's like a spring of
water that you get delicious water from. Right, That's right. So,
like I said, there's a big wait, We'll just take a.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
Break, how about that. Yeah, we'll be right back, okay, Chuck.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
So I said, there's a big, strong connection, as I
was saying before before we broke between the wind god
mclonticulty and a caddal and I wasn't lying. There's written
proof that shows that I'm correct.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
That's right. It's written in a pre Columbian document called
the Codex Borgia, and it is a manuscript. It's illustrated,
and it shows. It's got a lot of stuff in there.
It's got history, it's got like some of the things
that were studying, like botany, the stars, and it's got
a great, big, comprehensive list of their pantheon of gods.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
And the top notch mushroom soup casserole recipe.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
It might. For all I know, I can't tell anymore.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
So Miquelon Ticulti and a Coddal I just like saying
them now, I know now that I can say them correctly.
They're back to back, arms crossed like local anchored.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
Did they invent that?
Speaker 1 (06:42):
I think so? God both looking at the at you,
the viewer, almost with a sassy kind of look on
their face. Sure, and they are guarding the underworld together.
So these these guys are definitely connected in the Aztec pantheon,
which goes to support That's what those death whistles are
kind of symbolizing, these two gods together that in one
(07:07):
interpretation at least, you could say is life and death.
The god of life the god of death.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
That's right, So I mentioned it may be used to
kind of guide you through the spirit world in that
Aztec tradition, when someone dies, it's a pretty perilous route
to get to the underworld takes nine years, yeah, nine years,
And there's all kinds of rituals that people in the
living world do to urge them on to give them strength.
(07:35):
One example here in this case it's pretty appropriate, is
the dead cross a large field being whipped by a wind,
like a really fierce wind. And in that book, in
the Codex Borgia, those winds are represented by blades, by
obsidian blades, and those were the blades that they used
to make sacrifices. You go back to this temple site
(07:57):
where they found these whistles, and not only did they
have those whistles, but there was a ceramic bowl there
as well that had obsidian blades next to the body
of this guy.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
And a little sign that said take one, leave one.
So this, I mean, all of this together just basically
shows this is what those death whistles almost certainly were.
And the reason that we're not just us, but both
in particular Booth or both the music archaeologists, is going
to all this trouble is because we don't know exactly
(08:28):
what these things were used for, how they were used,
what they were meant to sound like. We just don't know.
So you have to piece together all this disparate information
to kind of come together. And what it ultimately is
laying a pretty good case for is that these were
ritual musical instruments used in a specific ritual, probably like
(08:51):
you said, to help departed souls across that field, that
one level of the underworld.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Yeah, the wind.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
And then also in that festival, I talked about touch
coddle to honor the god tit's ketlepoca. That one is
pronounced like it looks.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
Yeah. So in nineteen thirteen there was a folklorus named
Lewis Spence Nice who wrote really nailed that one who
wrote Myths of Mexico and Peru, and he described this
festival and this is sort of the key part as
far as we're concerned. On the day of this festival,
a youth was slain YadA, YadA YadA. He carried also
(09:29):
the whistle symbolical of the deity lord of the night wind,
and made with it a noise such as the weird
wind of night makes when it hurries through the streets.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
Yeah, and it does. I mean, there's videos online of
people playing these, like indigenous musicians playing death whistles, and
you can kind of get the idea of like, oh, okay,
this kind of does sound like an agonized scream. There's
a point to be made though that these replica death whistles,
especially you know, made by both they're larger than the
(10:03):
regular size, so just by that alone means they're not
going to sound like the other ones will. So I
think what both kind of concluded is that he's just
he's not instructed in how to play these original small
death whistles that the sacrifice guy was was holding, yeah,
and that he just can't do it. He never had
(10:24):
to do. He looked around at the crowd.
Speaker 3 (10:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Yeah. The notion that they were maybe used in battle.
They definitely did stuff like that with obviously drums, but
also blowing into conkshells like the Waponi wu getting together.
Maybe they're communicating with each other. Maybe they're just again
trying to like scare their enemies. But when they asked
both like well what about this death whistle, he was
like have you seen these things? He's like, this is
(10:50):
the size of my pinky. Yeah, it's like this didn't
get to scare even three hundred of these didn't gonna
scare anybody.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
No, but some drums will in a conk shell, well
for sure.
Speaker 3 (10:58):
Yeah, so that's it.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Death whistles probably not used in battle, but almost certainly
used in rituals that ended in someone's beheading. That's right,
Chuck said, that's right. I think that means short stuff
is it?
Speaker 2 (11:15):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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