The Great Divide

by Peter Watson

  Bloodletting imagery pervades Classic Maya art.4 Archaeologically, too, there is much evidence for it – for example, stingray spines are often found in tombs, located in the pelvic region of the remains of dead bodies. They were perhaps carried on belts which perished over time.

  Bloodletting appears to have been fundamental to Mayan rulership – Linda Schele and Mary Ellen Miller describe it as ‘the mortar of ritual life’. Blood was let at the birth of a child, at funerals, at the dedication of buildings, when crops were planted, but most of all it accompanied a ruler’s accession to the throne. The pain seems to have been integral to the institution. There are descriptions of people who were accustomed to the ritual not actually appearing to feel any pain, though alongside these are accounts of tobacco or hallucinogenic drugs being used, sometimes taken in enema form, presumably as a way of stupefying people as well as helping them acquire visions. Alongside these accounts are others whereby the massive blood loss entailed in these ceremonies itself brought about trance-like states, under the influence of which adherents experienced the burning smoke of the bloodstained sacred papers, ascending to the heavens in twirls, as ‘Vision Serpents’, sacred creatures out of whose mouths gods and ancestors would appear. The ability to summon up these images was part of the power of rulers just as shamans in earlier times had been able to enter the supernatural world and achieve contact with gods and forebears.

  Even when blood was not being let, the Maya wore bloodletting paraphernalia. They wore cloth strips and knotted bows on their arms and legs, through pierced earlobes, in their hair and in their clothing. Sacrificial paper made from the felted bark of the fig tree was used first as cloth and then torn off in strips to be used in bloodletting ceremonies, before being saturated in blood and burned as offerings to the gods.

  The Mayans believed that blood was the main ingredient of the Middle World, between the Underworld and the Sky Upper World, and that their gods needed human blood, carried upwards by burning. Smoke and blood were indistinguishable to them, different forms of the same sacred substance. The Mayans believed that the gods had used part of themselves to create the earth and its creatures and they had to repay this largesse by reciprocal offerings of the most important element in their bodies – their own blood.

  As Schele and Miller show, some of the most dramatic representations of ritual bloodletting are found in two series of lintels on buildings at Yaxchilán, near what is now the Guatemala-Mexico border, at the southern edge of Petén. These show a series of stages in a ritual possibly having to do with the accession in AD 681 of Shield Jaguar and his principal wife, Lady Xoc. In the first scene of the sequence, Shield Jaguar is shown wearing the shrunken head of a past sacrificial victim tied to the top of his own head. His wife kneels before him, and is depicted drawing a thorn-studded rope through the open wound in her perforated tongue. She lets the bloodstained rope fall into a basket at her feet which is already full of blood-soaked paper strips.

  A later lintel shows ‘the consequence and purpose’ of the rite. ‘The same woman, still kneeling, gazes upward at an apparition, a Tlaloc warrior, emerging from the gaping mouth of a Vision Serpent (figure 13). (Tlaloc was the goggle-eyed god of rain, fertility and water, but also of hail, thunder and lightning, who was feared as much as admired, the patron of the calendar, who demanded child sacrifice.)

  In this image, Lady Xoc holds in her left hand a bloodletting bowl; in her right hand, she grips a skull and a serpent symbol. It is notable that the serpent’s sinuous body rises upward through a scroll of stylised blood, ‘indicating that the vision originates in the blood itself’. During the accession rite, the ruler’s wife underwent a bloodletting so she could communicate with a warrior ancestor, perhaps seeking guidance.5

  According to Schele and Miller recent psychiatric research has shown that endorphins – chemically related to the opiates and produced by the brain in response to massive blood loss – can induce hallucinogenic experiences. The Mayans are known to have used some hallucinogenic drugs but do the practices – and the vision serpents shown on these inscriptions – imply that they had discovered they could experience visions without the use of drugs? If so, how might this development have originated?

  Bloodletting and pain were not the only devices used by the Maya. Their elaborate ceremonies were carried out against the background of imposing architecture and accompanied by music, dance, and elaborately costumed participants. A larger crowd of these participants, ‘wearing bloodletting paper or cloth tied in triple knots’, sat watching the accession ceremony on the terraces. According to accounts by Spanish missionaries soon after the Conquest, these participants would have prepared themselves by fasting, abstinence and ritual steam baths so that, at the climactic point in the ceremony, the ruler and his wife would appear from inside the most imposing building and, in full view of the rest of the assembled people, he would lacerate his penis and she her tongue. By means of ropes drawn through their wounds, the blood was carried to the paper strips. The strips of saturated paper were removed to braziers where they were burned, creating great columns of black smoke. ‘The participants, already dazed through deprivation, public hysteria and massive blood loss, were culturally conditioned to expect a hallucinatory experience. The rising clouds of swirling smoke provided the perfect field in which to see the Vision Serpent.’6

  Fig. 13 Lintel 24 from Yaxchilán, showing, at left, the ruler Shield Jaguar holding a giant torch over his wife, Lady Xoc, who pulls a thorn-lined rope through her tongue; and at right she witnesses the appearance of the doubleheaded Vision Serpent, a warrior emerging from the front.

  Fig. 14 Stone relief of post-ball game sacrifice scene from the north-eastern wall of the South Ball Court, El Tajín, Veracruz, Mexico, AD 850–110.

  The final act in the sequence of Yaxchilán inscriptions shows Shield Jaguar, dressed in (cotton) armour and carrying a stabbing knife. His principal wife stands by his side, blood still oozing from her wounded mouth, but she now holds her husband’s jaguar helmet and shield. She is helping him to prepare for battle, when he will be expected to take captives, which he will then sacrifice, in the final act of the accession ritual and which will consolidate his royal power.

  This sequence of rituals appears to have been fairly ancient, stretching back at least to a stela dated to AD 199. This inscription further suggested that the earlier parts of the ritual occurred fifty-two days before the final sequence. In this early carving, the king – Bac-T’ul – has a vision serpent draped over his shoulder, the serpent with a flint blade forming its tail – identifying it as a sacrificial being – and with sacrificial victims, their bodies cut in half, falling down the (World) Tree that grows out of the king. This is the king making physical contact (shaman-like) with supernatural entities.7

  The paraphernalia associated with bloodletting was itself regarded as sacred – the stingrays and flint blades used to make incisions were often decorated with the ‘Perforator god’. Carvings and clay models show the king, or soon-to-be-king, incising his penis, with a rope around his neck. This device shows that, for the duration of the ceremony, the figure is a penitent who has adopted the role of captive, the lowest rank of all in Maya society, and the person who will be sacrificed at the culmination of the ritual. Some figurines show individuals screaming in agony while bloodletting takes place, others show no such feelings. Possibly bearing pain stoically was admired though at times vessels were employed which may have contained drugs used to help ease the suffering (again, see below, this chapter). Other figurines show men dancing with large strips of bloodstained paper wound around their penises, still others wear jaguar-pelt skirts.8 The maize god was also brought into the ceremony, underlining what was said earlier, that the Maya regarded maize as the substance of man’s flesh and blood. Elsewhere, figurines which show bloodletting have lines drawn on their faces in the pattern of a skull. This suggests that this priest/shaman anticipated a particular role he would enter during the vision part of his ceremony. (W
e saw earlier that hallucinations induced by opiates in the rainforest could summon up visions of skeletons; chapter 13). One inscription dating from AD 350–500 is taken from the lid of what is called a cache vessel. These vessels, essentially two deep plates or bowls set lip to lip, were placed under floors during the dedication rites of new buildings, and contained offerings such as decapitated heads, flint blades, stingray spines and thorns. The blood-letting scene shown on this particular lid has liquid-type motifs in the background showing, say Schele and Miller, that ‘the entire image floats in blood’.9

  TORTURE, AGONY, CAPTIVE SACRIFICE

  Records of warfare in Mesoamerica are known from as early as the fourth century AD, and the eighth century appears to have been especially disfigured by conflict. These records often show captives under the feet of their conquerors and this encapsulates an important point, that Mayan warfare (like Moche and Mixtec warfare) was fought in order to capture (and not kill, at least not immediately, on the field of battle) the warriors of other polities, those captives being needed in bloodletting and sacred sacrificial ceremonies. Rulers who succeeded in capturing distinguished warriors often identified themselves afterwards as ‘Captor of . . .’ whoever it was.10

  The inscriptions also show that the taking of captives did not come easily but occurred only after aggressive hand-to-hand combat. The losers were stripped of their armour and finery and taken back to the city of their captors. Once there they could – if they were particularly distinguished – be kept alive for some time, being forced to take part in bloodletting ceremonies and/or tortured. Eventually, however, there was no escape: they would be sacrificed.

  In the inscriptions, captives are often identified with their names written on their thighs. They are invariably depicted at the foot of the inscription, without much clothing, being trodden on or lying on the ground, or having their hair held. Sometimes they are tied up, invariably they are shown in an attitude of humiliation. In contrast the victor is shown resplendent in his cotton armour, often with a jaguar helmet, jaguar boots and leggings, a jaguar cape, and wearing the (shrunken) heads of previous victims.

  In earlier times (AD 100–700), costumes of the victors were not limited to jaguar pelts but had a much greater variety of motifs and materials – using feathers, for example. From the eighth century on, however, as well as in later Mesoamerican art, ‘warriors in bird suits often fall prey to those in feline costumes’. It even came to the point, say Schele and Miller, that the depiction of warriors in bird costumes symbolised defeat, an idea that was to be reflected, as we shall see, in chapter twenty-three, in the Aztec belief that the current era was begun when Tezcatlipoca, a god conceived sometimes as a jaguar, defeated Quetzalcoatl, a feathered serpent. ‘Perhaps during the eighth century, the notions of cosmic cataclysm found to be prevalent among the Aztecs at the time of the Conquest were formed.’ Was this linked to the widespread wars of the eighth century? And is there a parallel of sorts here with the Bronze Age/Iron Age transition in the Old World, discussed in chapter sixteen?11

  During the classic period too, many powerful Maya kings came to believe that the position of the planet Venus could be a guide to victory in battle, and they would invoke its assistance. The dates associated with this invocation suggest that the most propitious time for battle was when Venus made its first appearance as (what we call) the Evening Star, visible after the ‘superior conjunction’, when Venus passes behind the sun (again, see below).

  Just as bloodletting and the accession of kings was linked in Maya ritual, so too was the sacrifice of captives. On one stela from Piedras Negras (in Petén, Guatemala) we see a captive bound to a wooden scaffold with a lattice base. The captive then had his heart torn out and his body was left at the foot of the scaffold, which was covered with cloth and jaguar skins by attendants. The new king stepped over the captive – his captive – leaving bloody footprints on a cloth-covered ladder. He reached the throne, at the top of the scaffold, where he received recognition by the public. In other words, captive (bloody) sacrifice sealed the accession ritual.12

  Other images show that this climax came only after protracted bloodletting rituals, not to mention outright torture. One inscription commemorates a battle that took place this time during an ‘inferior conjunction’ of Venus, when the planet passed in front of the sun and when, a few days later, Venus reappears as the Morning Star. This image shows king Chaan-Muan displaying nine captives and a decapitated head. It also features a figure either pulling out the finger nails of one captive, or else cutting off the ends of his fingers, so that blood streams down the captive’s arms. He has sunken cheeks, which may mean his teeth already have been pulled out – again blood flows from his mouth. Other captives are shown inspecting their hands and howling in agony. Yet another figure, already dead, has cut marks on its flesh indicating, as Schele and Miller put it, the ‘cat-and-mouse’ torture that preceded death. Still other figurines depict captives that could have been scalped and disembowelled, while one had kindling strapped to his back, suggesting that he was about to be set on fire. Finally, in yet another stela, showing eight captives bound together, the captor/ruler is shown with what appears to be an entire shrunken human body strapped to his chest.*

  Schele and Miller conclude by observing how striking it is that ‘in the representation of warfare in their art, the Maya addressed no issues of material gain. Instead, they cast warfare and sacrifice in terms of ritual that upheld the cycle of kingship.’ More than territory (to which they were not entirely indifferent), they needed captives, for their blood to nourish the gods.13

  A SPORT OF LIFE AND DEATH

  The Mayan ball game was a sport that was tough to play, requiring physical hardship, and could be fatal in its consequences. It involved the skilful manipulation of a heavy rubber ball and concluded as often as not with the sacrifice of the defeated. Invented in the second millennium BC, it proliferated throughout Mesoamerica to the point where, at the Conquest, there were more than 1,500 ball courts across the region: Cortés was so impressed that he took a troupe of players to Europe in 1528.14

  The rules of the game and the length of the ball court varied from location to location, averaging 120 feet by 30 feet, and they were often shaped like a capital ‘I’, with parallel masonry walls (sometimes vertical, sometimes sloping) enclosing a long narrow playing alley of earth or stone that fitted between two end zones. Usually whitewashed or painted in vivid colours, the courts were also decorated with tenoned stone heads, of jaguars, raptors and serpents. In some sculptures of teams, they have their eyes closed, indicating, say the ethnologists, that the ball game is taking place in the Underworld, and is being played by dead people. Carvings of tzompantli, or skull racks, show that the heads of decapitated losers would be displayed near the ball courts to advertise the consequences of defeat.

  The games were played for pleasure, for religious reasons, and as pre- and post-war rituals, even for forging alliances and legitimising rulership. According to Michael Whittington, the city of Cantona in the Puebla area of Mexico had 24 ball courts, the largest number anywhere. This site flourished between AD 600–1000.15

  As with so much else in Mesoamerica, the game appears to have begun with the Olmec. Early on, female ball players with strong secondary sex characteristics (large breasts and painted red nipples) were known, and they had nothing special in the way of status markers – they were just ordinary people. However, females disappear from the record about 1300 BC, when the game seems to have acquired a religious significance, operated by the elite. (Another case – reminiscent of the Mixtec – of the elite appropriating religion for its own ends.)16

  Teams consisted of from one to four players who had to control the ball without touching it with their hands. Points were scored if the ball bounced more than twice or was hit out of the court. The highlight – and ultimate aim – of the game was to hit the ball through a stone hoop tenoned into the wall, high up (maybe as much as twenty feet up). This hoop, however, was
only slightly larger than the ball, so that such scoring was rare and if it occurred usually signalled the end of the game. Balls were mostly made of solid rubber that was cooked and coloured black and were somewhere between 12 and 18 inches in diameter, making them more like a modern medicine ball than a hollow basket ball. They would have weighed about 8 lbs, except in Chichén Itźá (between Valladolid and Merida, in Yucatán), or El Tajín (on the gulf coast, near Veracruz City), where the balls had hollow cores formed by human skulls inside. The bouncing ball made a great deal of noise and this too formed part of the excitement (animated squiggles on certain inscriptions suggest both sound and movement of the balls). Ball courts have been found as far north as the south-west of what is now the United States. They were usually situated at the very heart of the sacred centres of ancient cities, integrated into important temple complexes.17

  There were several plants in the New World which produced gummy resins, including the prickly pear cactus (Opuntia spp.), sometimes used to make gods, or as incense during worship. But rubber, Castilla elastica, grew throughout Mesoamerica and in the northern Andes and was in ceremonial use as early as 1600 BC.18 It had several applications – to haft stone axes to wooden handles (holding them together and helping to absorb shock), as the tips for ceremonial drumsticks, as body armour, as footwear, as waterproof seals for containers, as the wicks for candles (held in jars made of copal), as hollow or solid figurines; and it had many medicinal uses, for cold sores, earache, as suppositories and in treatments for fertility and urinary problems.

  Many of its uses were religious and/or magical. For example, melted rubber was spattered over the pages of bark-paper books to simulate (and encourage) drops of rain that were understood to be sent to earth by the Tlaloques (tiny supernatural beings who assisted the rain god).19 In this context, rubber was mainly associated with water gods. Several rubber objects were dredged up from the Cenote of Sacrifice at Chichén Itźá and dated to somewhere between AD 850 and 1550. Often the rubber-painted items were burned at the climax of ceremonies, producing ‘a dense, sweet-smelling black smoke’.20