Three Visionary Lintels of Yaxchilan

In the Mexico Room of the British Museum, London, are three lintels (two originals, one archival cast) from the Classic Maya city of Yaxchilan in the state of Chiapas, Mexico. These exceptionally-crafted public artworks depict a fascinating ritual to evoke a Divine Ancestor, thus broadcasting both a sense of royal propaganda and of sacred intimacy, but it is the image of visionary beholding vision which is particularly interesting, disclosing an archaic expression to the scene.

The Classic Maya city of Yaxchilan is one of several archaeological sites located in close proximity to the Usumacinta River along the border between Guatemala and the Mexican state of Chiapas. It sits just on the Mexican side in a meander of the river, likely a vital spot since the river passed through the city and allowed the rulers to control – and perhaps impose duties upon – the trade and river traffic moving from the mountains towards lowland cities such as Palenque.

Anciently known as Pa' Chan ('Broken Sky') or Siyaj Chan ('Born from the Sky'), Yaxchilan's documented history begins around the mid 4th century AD but the city flourished in the Late Classic period (6th-9th centuries AD), dominating nearby Bonampak and the Usumacinta corridor, as well as establishing rivalries with both Piedras Negras and Palenque downstream.

Lintels 24, 25 and 26 from Structure 23, Yaxchilan

One of the dominant forms of sculpture and relief carving at Yaxchilan was the lintel, and due to the positioning of these artefacts in relatively protected positions above doorframes, many have survived with their exceptional details and craft intact. Miller states that these slightly private locations suggest that the lintel may have been used for more varied subject matter than is usual in Mayan iconography, and while many are purely textual in content, it must be said that the imagery on Yaxchilan's lintels tend to be rather idiosyncratic to the city.

Each surviving lintel has been numbered by archaeologists: the Lintels numbered 24, 25 and 26 are the ones which interest us here, located above the doorframes of Structure 23. This building was erected to mark the re-founding of the city under Itzamnaaj B'alam II and the lintels served as a sacred mythical precedent authorising the legitimacy of his rule and that of his subsequent dynasty. It was also considered to be the yotot, or royal house of the queen.

The three lintels, when viewed together, form a narrative of a ritual performed not by Itzamnaaj B'alam II, but by his wife, Lady K'abal Xok – it is a curious feature here and in another set of Yaxchilan lintels that despite the male-dominated Classic Maya culture, it is the women who appear to be the visionaries. The ritual depicted moves from a scene of blood-letting sacrifice, perhaps preparatory to the vision, to one of Lady K'abal Xok beholding a vision of a royal ancestor, perhaps the founder of her line or the line of her husband the king, before proceeding to an obscure ending in which she seems to arm him for battle or perhaps authorise his rule. Let us consider each lintel in turn.

Lintel 24

Executed in high relief with a deft attention to detail, this lintel depicts a blood-letting ritual. Itzamnaaj B'alam dominates the scene here, although his ritual function is entirely assistant to his wife in the lower right hand corner. He bears a flaming torch which illuminates the scene and suggests this took place at night. The text gives the date of the ritual, a Long Count date corresponding to the evening of October 28th, AD 709.

Lintel 24 from Structure 24, Yaxchilan
Itzamnaaj B'alam illuminates Lady K'abal Xok's bloodletting ritual

Lady K'abal Xok sits dressed in a richly embroidered cloak whose patterns are depicted with care, as is the headdress of a quetzal-feather mosaic and flower tassles. She has pierced her tongue and is pulling a rope through the hole to allow the blood to pour forth, facilitated by the obsidian blades woven into the rope. Her hands guide the rope through her tongue – curls of blood are seen around her mouth – before it coils down to a basket filled with paper onto which the blood spills. It is this basket which will become the source of the narrative for the next scene.

Lintel 25

This lintel must surely be considered one of the most spectacular images from Classic Maya art – indeed Sylvanus Morley considered it the pinnacle expression of the whole Maya civilisation.

Now dressed in even finer garments decorated with flower motifs and bearing both the basket of blood-soaked papers along with a serpent bar decorated with a skull in her hands, Lady K'abal Xok gazes upwards with shamanic intensity at the vision she has conjured. At her feet lies the basket of papers, and it is from these that a double-headed Vision Serpent emerges, winding its way up the left hand side of the lintel image, part-snake, part-centipede, before opening the jaws of its upper head to reveal Yoaat B'alam, the First-Seated Lord and ancestral founder of the Yaxchilan royal line. The lower jaws contain a standard representation of Chac, the Mayan Storm God.

Lintel 25 from Structure 23, Yaxchilan
Lady K'abal Xok beholds a vision of a Royal Ancestor

The upper figure Yoaat B'alam emerges face first in warrior garb with shield and spear, while his gaze is aimed directly at Lady K'abal Xok in a moment of sacred intimacy and communion. The ancestor wears a head-dress and mask indicative of his role as Aj K'ak' O Chaak ('Chac, He of Fire'), the local Yaxchilan title of the Mayan Storm God, and the tutelary defender of the city. So, at least, the main text on the top line of the lintel tells us. However, the second text – the five glyphs hanging down on the upper left side – informs us that “she is the likeness of Lady Yohl, the incense-scatterer of the Wite'naah [House of Origins] of Lady K'abal Xok.”

These words lend an androgynous sense to the face of the ancestor, and ambiguously suggest that the figure so envisioned represents the combined ancestral spirits of both of the king's and queen's houses. Nonetheless, this is a stunning and profound artwork of visionary intensity and its fuller significance will be discussed in a moment.

Lintel 26

The sequence of ritual ends with this somewhat damaged lintel of obscure meaning. Lady K'abal Xok has returned to Itzamnaaj B'alam II after the experience of her vision. The king wears quilted armour and bears a flint knife, gesturing with his hand to receive the jaguar mask and shield that his wife is giving him.

Lintel 26 from Structure 23, Yaxchilan
Lady K'abal Xok hands a jaguar mask to Itzamnaaj B'alam

The interpretation here is difficult: is Lady K'abal Xok preparing him for battle or does she re-inform his kingship through her vision and is thus handing him symbols of his reign? The word b'alam, 'jaguar', in the king's name and the textual reference to the king's accession several decades before this scene suggests the latter, but elsewhere we see no reference to jaguar masks as symbolising royal status, nor are we aware of any major battle around this time that Yaxchilan was involved in.

K'awiil, Vision Serpents and the Maya Cosmos

It is clear as we behold these lintels that we have access to a vastly different perceptual world than we are accustomed to. Some elements we can seem to interpret – the sense of royal prerogative, the formal nature of the ritual for example – but there is much that is subtle and unfamiliar. Indeed, while some aspects can be clarified by exploring the Mayan perceptual cosmos, there are features which remain obscure even to archaeologists. But in order to delve more deeply into the underlying perceptual currents moving through the depictions of this ritual, we need to come to an understanding of the Mayan god K'awiil, also known as God K, and the part he played in blood-letting vision rituals of this kind.

Vogt narrates that among the contemporary Tzotzil Maya, it is believed that blood conveys not merely life but ch'ulel (Classic Maya ch'ul or k'ul). This is a complex word generally referring to the soul of a person, but it can also mean 'to dream or envision' and 'holy or sacred', and given that the soul has several parts, it often has a sense of the essence of the soul rather than the soul itself. In Classic Maya and colonial Yucatec texts we see a parallel concept in the itz, a sacred substance that was held to manifest in a variety of forms from dew, sweat, milk, tears, and tree sap to melted wax, rust, resin or incense. It was often called yitz k'an 'the itz of the sky', disclosing its nature as the ch'ul of the gods, and thus where ch'ul can be considered human and earthly, itz is divine and cosmic: indeed it has been termed 'cosmic sap'.

According to Freidel and Schele, the link between blood-letting and the apparition of a deity was that "...when the ancient Maya let blood, they were feeding the gods their ch'ul and giving of their souls..." and that at least one of the aims of this was to enter trance and achieve direct communion with the gods. They also note that the Classic Maya word itzam, 'one who manipulates itz' is a term for shaman: Itzamnaaj B'alam II's name thus resonates strongly with a royal prerogative over this sacred substance and the interaction between ch'ul and itz that blood-letting implies.

The name of the god presiding over such rituals was K'awiil, an aspect of the storm god Chac, principal among whose functions was to be present during religious activities and to inform royal power. His name means 'sustenance' in several Maya languages in the colonial period (including Yucatec and K'iche'), referring to any precious substance, whether plant, food or bodily fluid, given freely to the divine, but may have meant 'powerful one' in the Classic Maya language. This latter meaning functioned as a title of Chac, and K'awiil appears to have been in part the personification of lightning. Both of these titles also refer to the ritual at hand – blood-letting and an apparition of an ancestor masked as 'powerful' Chac.

As Freidel and Schele note: “K'awiil was a nexus for powerful phenomena in the Classic Maya world that conjoined spirit to body and sustenance to sacrifice,” and in so perceiving this, the artesans took great care to implicitly depict K'awiil in several places on Lintel 25.

K'awiil was often depicted with one leg in the form of a serpent, simultaneously representing the snakelike action of lightning but also the overwhelming sensations of bodily envelopment during the course of trance and vision. In one famous image from a Classic Maya vase, a woman is shown entwined and entranced in K'awiil's serpent leg, although the vision she is experiencing is not shown. Freidel and Schele make a convincing case that the serpent represents the way of K'awiil, a word ubiquitous throughout modern Maya languages to refer to an animating presence (Yucatec way, wayob), dreaming aspect of the soul (Tzotzil vayijel) or a shapeshifting spiritual being associated with great shamans or sorcerors (Lacadon ah way) as well as verbs with a range of meanings from 'transfigure, enchant' to 'sleep, dream'.

K'awiil with his serpent leg enveloping a woman into trance
Classic Maya vase, provenance not found

It is clear we have a network of words – ch'ul, itz, k'awiil and way – referring to the invocation and feeding of a deity through a ritual that transformed blood-borne soul-stuff into cosmic sap, and this sustenance brought the deity, or an ancestral spirit acting as the deity, from the world of the gods into close proximity with the visionary. The god K'awiil is the essential element linking all of these: the ancestral spirit comes wearing a mask of an warlike aspect of Chac, and Lady K'abal Xok bears in her hand a double-headed serpent bar, an intimate symbol of K'awiil who is often seen emerging from either jaw in Maya iconography.

The Vision Serpent, the way of K'awiil, dominates the scene, and its double-head mirrors the serpent bar that she grasps during her vision. That Vision Serpents come to disclose wisdom is underscored by Eric Thompson (as reported in Freidel, Schele & Parker) in his narration of an early twentieth century shamanic initiation among the Q'eqchi:

“At the end of the period the initiate is sent to meet Kisin...[a Q'eqchi deity who] takes the form of a large snake called Ochcan... When the initiate and Ochcan meet face to face, the latter rears up on his tail and, approaching the initiate till their faces are almost touching, puts his tongue in the initiate's mouth. In this manner, he communicates the final mysteries...”

This description closely mirrors the scene on Lintel 25, the gaze of intimacy between the two Classic Maya subjects powerfully illustrating the face-to-face interaction of the modern Q'eqchi initiate. The name 'Ochcan' is revealing: it occurs in Classic period inscriptions too and is perhaps better expressed as Och K'an, 'enter the sky', that is to say, the world of the gods. Here, then, is a clear expression of the Maya understanding of the Vision Serpent as portal, a conduit through which the visionary could enter the world of the gods, or through which the gods could enter this earthly realm.

K'awiil-related elements on Lintel 25
(1) Mask of Aj K'ak' O Chaak, with which K'awiil is identified
(2) Double-headed Vision Serpent, the way of K'awiil
(3) A second Chac image
(4) Serpent bar, from which K'awiil is often seen emerging
(5) Basket of blood-soaked papers or cloth - K'awiil as 'sustenance'

When the jaws of the serpent open, they “convey the gods and ancestors into the land of the living”  and according to Freidel and Schele, the name of the Vision Serpent on this particular lintel is Waxaklahun Ub'ah K'an. This is a complex name redolent with wordplays suggestive of both the above sacred-mundane interchange and of the warlike aspects of K'awiil as Chac: waxaklahun means 'eighteen' and can refer to the number of heads, b'a, or the number of images, b'ah, of the serpent, k'an, but equally can refer to the eighteen stormlike and visionary actions, b'ah, of the sky, k'an, a variant form of the word chan.

The persistence of the word k'an, 'sky', here reveals an astronomical dynamic to the proceedings, since it is held by Schele that the double-headed Vision Serpent (featured here also in the serpent bar that Lady K'abal Xok holds) draped across the World Tree in Classic Maya iconography represents the ecliptic, the celestial plane through which the Sun, moon and planets move, all of which were envisaged as deities.

Thus we have here access, not merely to a simple vision-inducing ritual invoking royal power, but a complex of perceptual experiences that render an authentic Maya cosmos in microcosm. Lady K'abal Xok gazes not merely into the face of a serpent or ancestor, but into the very highest levels of the world of the gods moving through the sky, as she engages in actions of reciprocal sustenance through the sacrifice of her blood-ch'ul and its transformation into cosmic sap as food for the gods. This discloses a wholly different relation to the sacred than anything in the West from the past two thousand years, and the notion that a deity can be conjured to appear by a woman of royal prestige and spiritual power through the feeding of her own essence is a powerful and archaic image.

The notion of serpent as sacred portal is perhaps unusual (though powerfully descriptive to those who have experienced such visionary trances!) but the expression of transcendence in this mythical image resonates with traditions of divine serpents throughout the non-Occidental world.

There is also a subtle warlike implication here: the name waxaklahun ub'ah k'an as an essence of the god Chac in his warrior aspect seems to inform the actions of the final image in the sequence, and perhaps Itzamnaaj B'alam is indeed being armed by his wife after a visionary intercession with their ancestors for a successful outcome to the exploit, which is unrecorded elsewhere but given the commissioning of these lintels, must have been successful.

Equally profound, however, on Lintel 25 is a meta-method of expressing visionary experience not commonly seen in contemporary artworks, that of Visionary Beholding Vision, a ubiquitous and pan-cultural archaic device used to disclose sacred intimacy. The present author has utilised this style several times in various works, as do a few others (Pablo Amaringo is a notable and well-known example) and it is hoped that the dissemination of images such as these will bring this device into a wider understanding.

Finally, Miller reports in her review of Mesoamerican art that traces of traces of red, yellow and green polychrome have been found on Lintel 25 and others, confirming what had long been suspected: that the Yaxchilan reliefs were once brightly painted. Such colours must have lent an even more dazzling visionary intensity in their original forms than the surviving images that have come down to us, an intensity we can now only imagine, or attempt to experience ourselves through our own trancelike voyages through Vision Serpents into the reciprocal world of the Mayan ancestors.

Postscript – Lintel 15 on Structure 21

Two generations after Lady K'abal Xok's night of vision, on March 24th AD 755, an identical vision-inducing ritual appears to have been repeated by Wak Tuun, the principal wife of Yaxun B'alam IV, Itzamnaaj B'alam's son and the new ruler of Yaxchilan after the latter's death. We see again the finely decorated clothing and the basket of blood-soaked cloths, suggesting a now-lost lintel in which Wak Tuun was shown performing the blood-letting part of the rite.

Lintel 15 from STructure 21, Yaxchilan
Wak Tuun envisions a Royal Ancestor

In this case, however, the serpent is depicted in a simpler manner with a single head, and many of the finer trappings of office previously depicted, such as the serpent bar, are no longer present. The craftsmanship is of a lower quality than Lady K'abal Xok's commissions forty-six years earlier, and there appears to be less intimacy between the apparition and Wak Tuun: their gazes are not so closely entwined, and the ancestor's hand is depicted in a stereotypical pose that suggests it is addressing Wak Tuun and speaking to her rather than seeking communion.

The text tells us the apparition is of the Waterlily Serpent, another way of K'awiil, one associated with the psychoactive Nymphaea ampla lily which may have been added to the balche' drink so as to quicken the visions, and which may be the flowers featured on Lady K'abal Xok's garments on Lintel 25. The ancestor conjured here is named as Lady Baahkab, whose identity is  unknown.

This raises a question: it seems clear that the ancestral spirit Lady Baahkab does not come from the more well-known lineage begun by Yoaat B'alam, and which included Itzamnaaj B'alam and his son Yaxun B'alam as descendants, but perhaps from the notable Yaxchilan family the Ik', of which Wak Tuun was a member (although it should be noted she may have come from Motul de San Jose, another polity some 100km to the east of Yaxchilan). It appears this female visionary is conjuring one of her own ancestors in this image rather than one of the king's, much as Lady K'abal Xok may have done, and again, in the context of a male-dominated Classic Maya society, it needs to be asked why, at Yaxchilan and elsewhere, do we principally see women, and not men, acting as the visionaries?

So far in my researches, I have not been able to uncover a satisfying answer to this fascinating question beyond generalisations which may not pertain accurately to a Mayan cultural context. Likely it has been addressed by archaeologists and anthropologists working in the field, and I hope to come across that research in due course!

Bibliography

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