A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [130]
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,