A sublime rite: Yaxchilan Lintel 15 deep dive
Let's explore Lintel 15 of Yaxchilan
This is my first ‘deep dive’ on a piece of art on this website. Deep dives will be more complex than my other writing, but you still shouldn't need to be an expert to read this.
This is my drawing of Lintel 15 from Yaxchilan. It was probably painted with reds, greens, and blues in ancient times.
Take a moment before reading to think about what you see. Maybe you’ll guess some of the things I’m about to write.
The superficial
On its face, this is an image of a kneeling woman holding a bowl while a serpent-like creature rises from a different bowl. She’s surrounded by writing and wearing a lavish garment. The serpent has a person’s face emerging from its mouth.
So that’s a lot to unpack.
Lintels are stone or wooden beams that go over the doorways in many ancient Maya buildings. You’d only see them if you looked up. Since many of these buildings served specific ritual functions, not everyone in town would have ever gotten to see them at all.
There were also two other doors to this temple, each with its own lintel. But we’ll put this piece in context in a moment. First, I want to write about about what we’re seeing.
The meaning behind the gestures
The kneeling woman is Ix Wak Tuun; the glyphs tell us this, but I’ll get back to those.
She wears a type of clothing called a huipil. It’s a hand-brocaded garment still made today in many parts of the Maya world. This one features a square pattern with what might be two reeds forming an ‘x’ in the center. The pattern suggests the common metaphor among the ancient Maya that rulers were positioned at the center of existence. Or it just looks cool.
She wears a spotted headband. In real life, this may have been made from bark paper. The spots probably represent the spots on a jaguar.
Then there’s the bowl. That’s where things get intense. In the bowl are strips of paper. They also have what look like jaguar spots on them, but they're drops of the woman’s blood. She’s preparing the paper to be burned, much like the bowl with the ‘snake’ emerging from it.
Human sacrifice was a terrible part of ancient Mesoamerican society. But it wasn’t as common as the Spaniards would have you believe. What was more common was auto-sacrifice. This is when leaders drew their own blood to call ancestors and supernatural beings.
And that’s what our friend Ix Wak Tuun is doing. We’re catching her midway through a ritual we’ve seen in other contexts. She may have drawn a rope through her tongue to get the blood she needed.
If that sounds rough, it is meant to be. There are examples of what Sianne Ngai would call ‘the cute’ among ancient Mesoamerican art. But this is not one. As with an image of Christ bloodied on the cross, this piece invokes the sublime wonder and horror of a profound religious experience.
After she had her bowl of blood, which she may have mixed with incense like copal, she burned it. In the image, the smoke which poured off the bowl has taken the form of a serpent-like creature.
I’ve heard people say this creature is the feathered serpent called K’uk’ulkan. But some scholars disagree. Instead, this might be the caterpillar form of the black witch moth. These caterpillars were conduits between worlds. That’s exactly what this creature is doing: From its open mouth emerges a being from another world to offer counsel to Ix Wak Tuun.
So she’s not talking to the serpent (or caterpillar if that argument is correct), she’s talking to the guy. He looks fairly human, so we might assume he’s an ancestor, but the glyphs seem to suggest otherwise.
The glyphs
Exploring Maya art often includes epigraphy, or the reading of ancient inscriptions. The writing and the art are linked; the writing tells some parts of the story while the art tells others. Together, they form a whole narrative. They’re like the narrative text in blocks in a comic book.
This inscription only has 17 glyphs, so you might think it’s fairly straightforward. But we run into a problem right away because the very first glyph is just slightly eroded. The first two glyphs tell us the date, which is kind of important. Missing it is an issue.
Luckily, I mentioned there are other lintels in this same building. We assume they’re all from around the same time. Using the remaining, uneroded glyph, and the dates on the other lintels, scholars think this lintel is from March 26, 755 CE.
Sentences in Mayan languages usually start with a verb. Here, it’s the verb used to talk about summoning spirits and ancestors. Since that’s what she’s doing in the image, we can assume they’re talking about the same event.
Next up is the name of the thing she’s summoning. It’s a bit confusing, but it seems to be an aspect of the lord of lightning, K’awiil, or his spirit companion, the waterlily serpent. Since K’awiil was also associated with leadership, she may be asking him about the future of Yaxchilan’s dynasty.
The inscription also seems to tell us that this was her first time performing this kind of ritual. But that part’s confusing.
The upside-down ‘L’ that hangs in front of her face tells us her name, her place of birth, and her royal titles. Sometimes the ancient Maya put a person’s name next to them, or even on their body, which is helpful for figuring out who’s who.
This all leaves us with lots of questions, like what advice was she seeking from the spirit companion of K’awiil? And how did she eat after piercing her tongue with a rope?
But it gives us a pretty comprehensive image of an ancient Maya ritual. We know when it was, who participated, and what otherworldly being they chatted with. We also know how they did it and the kind of outfit they wore.
There’s also no man in this image. There are other images of these sorts of rituals showing more than one participant, like a husband and wife together. But Ix Wak Tuun is alone. So is this a feminist monument?
Context
Spoiler: Probably not. During the Classic era of Maya history, art does feature politically-active, dynamic women. I’ll talk about many of them in the upcoming months.
One was Ix K’abal Xook, wife of the previous king. She seems to have been involved in important rituals at Yaxchilan.
Ix Wak Tuun’s lintel has stylistic elements in common with the more-famous Lintel 25. Likely they were by the same artists, or the kids of the original artists. In that sense, of course there’s a stylistic similarity.
But this goes further: Ix Wak Tuun is in a similar pose as K’abal Xook, she’s wearing a similar outfit, and the composition is similar. It would appear to go beyond simple stylistic similarity into the realm of reference.
Lintel 15 is meant to make you think of Lintel 25 and make you think of Ix Wak Tuun as a powerful queen the same way Ix K‘abal Xook was.
While it's a lot to gather about someone from a single monument, this makes me wonder if Ix Wak Tuun had impostor syndrome. She followed a great and famous queen who was known for her acts of penance. It must have been intimidating.
This is one of three lintels over the entrance to the same temple. The central one portrays the ruler of Yaxchilan at the time, Yaxuun Bahlam IV, who was probably her husband. The third one portrays her husband again . . . with one of his other wives.
There, the ritual they’re performing possibly has to do with the blessing of Yaxuun’s son. So maybe Ix Wak Tuun is also seeking advice from the spirit world about Yaxuun’s son, since he was heir to the throne. But it wasn't her son; she was doing the labor for someone else's kid.
There are some folks who argue that most Maya rulers only took one wife, so perhaps Yaxuun had wives who died young and he remarried.
In the Classic era, daughters of rulers often married into the royal families of other cities to strengthen political ties. When they did this, they usually kept their old ‘emblem glyph,’ which is like a dynastic name.
She says she's from the nearby city of Ik'a', meaning she wasn't local to Yaxchilan. Although she doesn't say she's Yaxuun's wife, the fact that she wasn't local suggests she wasn't a relative. We also know she wasn't his mom because we know his mom's name.
That leaves 'wife' as the most logical solution. On its own, Ix Wak Tuun’s altar presents an image of a strong elite. But Yaxuun still wanted people to know that he was the one in charge, and the one with the power.
That said, the inclusion of named royal women in art at all was a recent development. It may have been a sign that royal women had gained more political power. I’ll write more about this in July with a deep dive into Lady Six Sky.
There are also signs that Yaxuun wasn’t as in charge as he pretended, which I’ll talk about in my politics deep dive on Yaxuun later this month.
Review
Lintel 15 of Yaxchilan shows a woman summoning a supernatural being. She was probably asking its advice, maybe about the new heir to the throne of Yaxchilan. The woman is named in the glyphs as Ix Wak Tuun and was probably a wife of the ruler of Yaxchilan, Yaxuun Bahlam. It’s a fabulous piece with ties to other important pieces of artwork. It at once portrays the strength of Ix Wak Tuun while also acknowledging her service to the ruler.