PART ELEVEN
This section explores life in great royal courts across the world through objects that were intimate, private expressions of public power. Although made for different settings, all these objects were created so that the rulers of the world could state and re-state the full extent of their authority, to themselves, to their courtiers and their gods. Sometimes they also suggest the very real obligations they saw as going with that authority. The civilizations of Tang China, the Islamic Empire and the Maya in Meso-America were all at their peak during these centuries. Although medieval Europe suffered periods of chaos, there were moments of high artistic achievement, such as those at the court of the Frankish emperor.
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Stone relief, from,Yaxchilan (Chiapas), Mexico
700–750 AD
It’s tough at the top – at least, that’s what those at the top like us to think. The long hours, the public exposure, the responsibility. In return, though, most of us would argue, they get the status and the pay – and many people, it seems, are willing to settle for that particular trade-off. But almost everyone would think twice about envying anyone, however privileged, whose regular duty was to go though an ordeal like the one portrayed here. I find it hard even to look at the image.
It is a limestone relief carving, about the size of a small coffee table. It’s rectangular and it shows two human figures. A man stands holding a blazing torch over the kneeling figure of a woman. Both are elaborately costumed, with wonderfully extravagant headdresses. So far, so innocuous. But when you look more closely at the woman the scene becomes horribly disconcerting, because you can see that she is pulling a rope through her tongue – and the rope contains large thorns which are piercing and lacerating her.
My squeamish European eye keeps focusing on this stupefying act, but for the Maya of around AD 700 this would have been a scene of their king and his wife together in a devotional partnership, jointly performing a ceremony of fundamental significance for their position and their power. It was commissioned by the king for the queen’s private building, and it was certainly intended to be seen by only a very select few.
The great Maya civilization collapsed not long after this stone slab was carved, and its deserted cities bewildered the first Spanish visitors in the sixteenth century. For hundreds of years afterwards, explorers travelling in southern Mexico and Guatemala came across huge abandoned cities hidden in dense jungle. One of the first modern visitors, the American John Lloyd Stephens, tried to describe his wonderment in 1839:
Of the moral effect of the monuments themselves, standing as they do in the depths of the tropical forest, silent and solemn, different from the works of any other people, their uses and purposes and whole history so entirely unknown, with hieroglyphs explaining all but perfectly unintelligible, I shall not pretend to convey any idea.
Maya territory covered modern Honduras, Guatemala, Belize and southern Mexico. The first Maya cities have their beginnings around 500 BC, just a little before the Parthenon was built in Athens, and the Maya civilization continued for well over a thousand years. The greatest cities had tens of thousands of inhabitants, and at their centre were pyramids, public monuments and palaces. Thanks to the relatively recent deciphering of Maya script, we can now read the glyphs on their monuments, which baffled Stephens, as the names and histories of actual rulers. In the course of the twentieth century the Maya ceased to be a mythologized lost race and became a historical people.
Our stone sculpture of the queen lacerating her tongue comes from the city of Yaxchilan. Between AD 600 and 800, late in the Classic Maya age, Yaxchilan became a large and important city, the major power in the region. It owed its new eminence to the king shown on the stone lintel, Shield Jaguar, who at the age of 75 commissioned a building programme to celebrate the successes of what would eventually be his sixty-year reign. The lintel sculpture comes from a temple that seems to have been dedicated to his wife, Lady K’abal Xook.
On the carving King Shield Jaguar and his wife are both magnificently dressed, their spectacular headdresses probably made of jade and shell mosaic and decorated with the shimmering green feathers of the quetzal bird. On top of the king’s headdress you can see the shrunken head of a past sacrificial victim, possibly a defeated enemy leader. On his breast he wears an ornament in the shape of the sun god, his sandals are of spotted jaguar pelt, and at his knees there are bands of jade. His wife has particularly elaborate necklaces and bracelets.
This image is one of three found in the temple, each one positioned above an entrance. Together they make it clear that the act of pulling thorns through the tongue was not just to make the Queen’s blood flow as an offering but was deliberately intended to create intense pain – pain which, after due ritual preparation, would send her into a visionary trance.
Sado-masochism, on the whole, receives a bad press. Most of us take quite a lot of trouble to avoid pain, and wilful ‘self-harm’ suggests an unstable psychological condition. But around the world there have always been believers who see self-inflicted pain as a route to transcendental experience. To the average twenty-first-century citizen, and certainly to me, this willed suffering has about it something deeply shocking.
For the queen to inflict such agony on herself was a great act of piety – it was her pain that summoned and propitiated the kingdom’s gods, and that ultimately made possible the king’s success. The psychotherapist and writer on women’s psychology, Dr Susie Orbach:
If you can create a feeling of pain in the body and you survive it, you can move into a state of, not quite ecstasy, but out-of-the-ordinariness, a sense that you can transcend, you can do something rather special.
What I find interesting about this image, which is quite startlingly horrific, is how visible the woman’s pain is. I think that, in the present day, we’ve come to hide our pain. We have jokes about our capacity for pain but we don’t really show it.
What we see here is something that women can understand and can reflect upon, although it’s very exaggerated; the kind of relation to self and to a husband that a woman often makes – or to her children. And it’s not that men are extracting them. It’s that women experience their sense of self by doing these things, by enacting them. They give them a sense of their own identity. And I’m sure that was true for her.
The next lintel in the series shows us the consequence of the queen’s self-mortification. The ritual blood-letting and the pain have combined to transform Lady K’abal Xook’s consciousness, and they enable her to see, rising from the offering bowl that holds her blood, a vision of a sacred serpent. From the mouth of the snake a warrior brandishing a spear appears – the founding ancestor of the Yaxchilan royal dynasty, establishing the king’s connection with his ancestors and therefore his right to rule.
For the Maya, blood-letting was an ancient tradition, and it marked all the major points of Maya life – especially the path to royal and sacred power. In the sixteenth century, 800 years after this lintel was carved, and long after the Maya civilization had collapsed, the Spanish encountered similar blood-letting rites that still survived, as the first Catholic bishop of Yucatán reported:
They offered sacrifices of their own blood, sometimes cutting themselves around in pieces and they left them in this way as a sign. Sometimes they scarified certain parts of their bodies, at others they pierced their tongues in a slanting direction from side to side and passed bits of straw through the holes with horrible suffering; others slit the superfluous part of the virile member leaving it as they did their ears.
The unusual thing about our sculpture is that it shows a woman playing the principal role in the ritual. Lady K’abal Xook came from a powerful local lineage in Yaxchilan, and by taking her as a wife the king was allying two powerful families. This particular lintel is an extraordinary example of the kinds of rights and ceremonies that a queen would engage in. We don’t have a series like it from any other Maya city.
K’abal Xook’s husband, Shield Jaguar, had an immensely long reign for the age, but within a few decades of the deaths of the couple, all the great cities of the Maya were in chaos. On the later Maya monuments, warfare is the dominant image, and the last monuments date to around AD 900. An ancient political system that had lasted for more than a thousand years had disintegrated, and a landscape where millions had lived seems to have become desolate. Why this should have happened remains unclear.
Environmental factors are a popular explanation – there is some evidence of a prolonged drought, and, given the density of the population, the decline in resources a drought would cause could well have been catastrophic. But the Maya people did not vanish. Mayan settlements continued in several areas, and a functioning Mayan society lasted right up to the Spanish Conquest. Today there are about six million Mayans, and their sense of heritage is strong. New roads now open up access to the formerly ‘lost’ cities – Yaxchilan, where our sculpture came from, used to be accessible only by light plane or a river trip across hundreds of miles, but since the 1990s it is just an hour’s boat ride from the nearest town and a big draw for tourists.
A vision of a sacred serpent and warrior ancestor rises from Lady K’abal Xook’s offering bowl
There was a Maya uprising as recently as 1994, when the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, as they called themselves, declared war on the Mexican state. Their independence movement profoundly shook modern Mexico. ‘We are in the new “Time of the Mayas”,’ a local play proclaimed, as statues of the Spanish conquistadors were toppled and beaten into rubble. Today, the Maya are using their past to renegotiate their identity and seeking to restore their monuments and their language to a central role in national life.