Green and Wrinkly: The Sexiest Fruit

Question: Are there any gods, rituals, or anything else mythological associated with avocados, or more importantly, guacamole?

I hope you were ready to talk about how avocados are really testicles, because that's what's going to happen.

Avocados probably originated in Mexico, and most of their historic importance has been there; there is still some debate among horticultural scholars over whether the fruit started in Mexico and was later dispersed via seeds and trading to various other parts of Central and South America, or whether it started somewhere else and we just happen to have noticed it most prominently in Mexico, but our oldest evidence of consumption and cultivation of them comes from the central Mexican area. People chowing down on avocados is an old, old tradition, predating most of the familiar cultures of the area by a couple of millennia at least.

Our English word "avocado" is a slightly Spanish-transformed version of the original Nahuatl word for the fruit, which is ahuacatl (say it out loud, you can hear the resemblance). What's exciting about that is that ahuacatl is also the word for testicles, and there's a good reason for that.

Because they tend to grow like that. So you can see where people might have gotten the idea that they should name the fruit as if it were tree-junk, because that's pretty much what it is. Guacamole is just as excitingly dude-part-related; the word is another corrupted but still very close loan from Nahuatl, and in its original form was ahuacamolli (literally, "testicle sauce").

Now, I don't know of any avocado deities in particular; there are plenty of Central and South American fertility gods who probably include avocados in their general responsibilities (like Yum Caax, the Maya forest-god, for example), but none who just make the avocado and the avocado only their most important job. However, in several myths where a divine fruit is involved, especially in a fertility and birth context, scholars love to debate whether or not the fruit in question might be an avocado. In the Maya myth where Hun Hunaphu/Hun Nal grows into a tree from his severed head and impregnates the underworld goddess Xquic - depending on the version, by spitting into her hand or by getting her to eat a fruit from the tree - has been theorized to be perhaps suggesting that he grew into an avocado tree, thanks to the avocado's connection to fertility and male reproduction. The Inca myth of Coniraya impregnating Cavillaca by tricking her into eating a fruit full of his semen is also possibly an avocado, or in some versions a lucuma (which is a really similar fruit, in fact). There's no conclusive proof in either case, but when there's a fruit that is supposedly a testicle, and there are women getting pregnant from eating or looking at mysterious fruits, it's not a huge logical leap.

As for rituals, though, one of the oldest ones on the books: the avocado was considered an aphrodisiac by various Mesoamerican peoples, especially the Aztecs and Maya, so it would be consumed, as fruit or guacamole, by men who wanted to pep up their own testicles in preparation for a night of hot heir-siring. I've even seen a few books claim that the Aztecs prevented unmarried women from going outside during avocado harvest time in case all the sex in the air might accidentally cause them to start popping up pregnant, although I haven't been able to find a firm source on that one.

But, at any rate, avocados are all about dude fertility in Mesoamerica and South America, so if your Scion chronicle wants to use them, look out for dangerous levels of sexiness.