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Smoke serpent delivers the ancestor
The vision
The queen pulls a rope strung with thorns through her tongue. Blood drips down her chin onto a bowl of paper, the paper burns, and the smoke rises into a snake whose head comes down over her. Its mouth opens, and out comes the founder of the Yaxchilan lineage, carrying a shield and a spear.
Why ancestors listened
The hieroglyphs record what she is asking: protection for her husband in the battle he is about to fight. Royal families had a direct line upward. When a royal died, the soul rose to the heavens instead of sinking to the underworld, so living kings and queens could ask those ancestors to speak to the gods about rain for the harvest or a blessing in battle.
Cutting themselves and burning the blood was the most common sacrifice of the classic period. Kings and their families did it themselves, and the smoke served as the conduit that carried the request upward.
Why was blood the offering?
In Maya belief, the gods had given their own blood to bring humans into being, so blood was a repayment. Carvings and painted pots show rulers drawing it from the tongue, the ears, and other body parts. Offerings were caught on strips of bark paper and burned, and the smoke carried the gift upward. Stingray spines and obsidian blades turn up in Maya tombs and caches as the likely tools.
How do we know what the glyphs say?
For decades scholars thought Maya writing held only calendars and astronomy. In 1960, Tatiana Proskouriakoff showed that the inscriptions at Piedras Negras recorded the births, accessions, and deaths of rulers. Yuri Knorozov had argued in the 1950s that the signs stood for sounds, and by the 1980s and 1990s most of the script could be read. That is why Yaxchilan's lintels can be read as an account of who asked what, and when.
Why does the serpent carry an ancestor?
Carvings at Yaxchilan and other cities show a vision serpent rising from offerings, with a figure emerging from its open mouth. The serpent worked as a doorway between the human world and the world of ancestors and gods. At Yaxchilan, several carved lintels show royal women and men conjuring such visions. One of the best known, Lintel 25, was removed from the site in the 1880s and is now in the British Museum.
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