FILE #007 • HISTORICAL ARCHIVE
The earliest evidence of Patolli dates to the Classic Period in Mesoamerica. Boards have been found scratched into stucco floors at Palenque, Tikal, and Teotihuacan. The game was played by the Teotihuacanos, Toltecs, Maya, and later the Aztecs, spreading throughout Mesoamerica along trade routes.
For the Aztecs (Mexica), Patolli was a ritual enactment of cosmic order. The 52 squares correspond to the Xiuhmolpilli—the 52-year Calendar Round when the 260-day ritual calendar (Tonalpohualli) and 365-day solar calendar (Xiuhpohualli) synchronized. At the end of each 52-year cycle, the Aztecs believed the universe might extinguish, requiring the New Fire Ceremony to renew the sun. Playing Patolli was thus a manipulation of time itself.
The game was presided over by Macuilxochitl (Five Flower), deity of music, dance, flowers, and gambling. Players would invoke his name before throwing the beans, offering incense and prayers for favorable numbers. Winning was seen as divine favor; losing as cosmic disfavor.
Spanish chroniclers Diego Durán and Bernardino de Sahagún expressed shock at the intensity of Patolli gambling. Players arrived with six items to wager—blankets, maguey plants, precious stones, gold. As pieces were captured, items were lost. A player who lost everything would wager their own freedom. The final loss meant becoming tlacotin (slave) to the winner—a status reversible only if the winner later lost a similar wager or the slave bought their freedom.
After the fall of Tenochtitlan (1521), Spanish colonial authorities and the Catholic Church systematically targeted Patolli for eradication. The game's connection to gambling was viewed as vice, but its association with Macuilxóchitl and the old calendar made it an act of idolatry. Priests confiscated and burned game mats and beans. Indigenous people caught playing had their hands burned as punishment. The game was driven underground, surviving only in fragmented form in remote rural areas.
In the 20th century, anthropologists like Alfonso Caso documented surviving variants of Patolli among indigenous communities. The rules have been reconstructed from colonial codices, though the complex theological overlay of the Aztec court version is largely lost to history.