One of the anecdotes that is not normally told when the discovery of America is recounted is that the Aztecs received the Spanish by fumigating them with incense. We perceive it as an honor, incense was used in masses and was one of the 3 gifts of the wise men, but in reality it was intended to hide the strong smell of the conquerors.

Let us imagine for a moment how the conquerors traveled five centuries ago: for two months, a handful of men were locked up in a caravel without any type of hygiene. This was worthy of the worst pigsty imaginable.

In contrast, the Aztecs were just the opposite. Everyone bathed at least once a day, and the emperor even twice. They had bathhouses in almost every building and also some kind of saunas that helped them perspire and thus eliminate toxins. In addition, they already used some plants to exfoliate and wash themselves.

Why were we so dirty?

There's no single reason we were dirty so long ago. Actually it was a cluster of reasons. Coinciding with the rise of the Black Death, King Philip VI of France commissioned a study from his scholars to determine the causes of such a pandemic. After a while, it was determined that hot baths opened the pores of the skin and that is where the disease entered. The consequence was that bathhouses across Europe were closed.

Furthermore, on the peninsula, we already had a double aversion for clean water. First because in the s. And when the Visigoths conquered the territory, they demolished all the Roman baths, considering them effeminate. A true warrior did not need to bathe, they must have thought.

But as if this were not enough, when the Moors invaded the peninsula and began to conquer territory, they brought science and hygiene with them. Its fountains, pools and baths and its sanitary customs collided head-on with the Christian faith. That is why the belief spread that you should not bathe if you were a Christian and that dirt was a virtue. Moreover, it got to the point that if you could spend a whole year in the same clothes without taking them off, you would never get the "odor of sanctity."

Such was the aversion to water that Cardinal Cisneros himself advised the Catholic Monarchs to close and ban the Moorish baths in Granada after its reconquest. "The only water that the Moors will touch will be holy water" he is believed to have said. In the Inquisition, purification was achieved through fire.

Well, now we have the reasons why we were very careful dirty so long ago. Now we understand why they welcomed us with incense when we arrived in America, if I tell you the truth, it even seems little to me.

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