They offered sacrifices of their own blood, sometimes cutting themselves around in pieces and they left them in this way as a sign. Other times they pierced their cheeks, at others their lower lips. Sometimes they scarify 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 their superfluous part of the virile member leaving as it as they did their eats.

Thus did Diego de Landa, the first bishop of Yucatan, describe the bloodletting of the Yucatec Mayas. During the early years after the Conquest, similar ritual practices were reported from all the regions occupied by Mayan-speaking peoples. Bloodletting imagery pervades Classic Maya art as well. Archaeological evidence for it is abundant, although much of the regalia made of perishable materials is lost. Beginning is the Last Preclassic period, lancets made of stingray spines, obsidian and flint are regularly found in burials and caches. Stingray spines, for example, are often found in the pelvic regions of the dead and were perhaps originally contained in bags hunt from belts. It is clear that bloodletting was basic to the institution of rulership, to the mythology of world order, and to public rituals of all sorts. Through bloodletting the Maya sought a vision they believed to be the manifestation of an ancestor or a god. Thus the Maya expressed piety by letting blood from all parts of the body. Blood was the mortar of ritual life from Late Preclassic times until the arrival of the Spanish, who were shocked by the practice and discouraged it as idolatrous worship.

While the importance of blood sacrifice in Mesoamerican societies has long been recognized the practice was considered to be Mexican rather than fundamentally Maya. The recognition of event glyphs and the deciphering of iconography associated with bloodletting in the last twenty years has changed this view radically. The Spanish reaction was note exaggerated: bloodletting did permeate Maya life. For kings, every stage in life, every event of political or religious importance, every significant period ending required sanctification through bloodletting. When buildings were dedicated, crops planted, children born. Couples married of the dead buried blood was given to express piety and call the gods into attendance.

Consequently, the lancet—the instrument for drawing blood—became a sacred object infused with power. Models of stingray spines were manufactured from precious stone (Pl. 60), not for use as lancets but rather as symbols of the power inherent in the spine. The Maya carved bone awls with bloodletting imagery to declare their function as lancets and to use in the costuming that signaled the rite (Pl. 61). The concept of the lancet itself was personified in the form of the Perforator God (Fig. IV.1), although this personified lancet is perhaps more accurately considered a sacred power object rather than a deity. The triple and double cloth knots tied around the forehead of the Perforator God became the most pervasive symbol of the bloodletting rite. The Maya wore cloth strips and knotted bows on their arms and legs, through pierced earlobes, in the hair and in clothing. Sacrificial paper made from the felted bark of the fig tree were used as cloth; unlike all other kind of cloth, both this paper cloth and cotton cloth were cut and torn when used in the bloodletting rite. After the paper cloth became saturated with blood, it was burned in a brazier, for the gods apparently required that blood be transformed into smoke in order to consume it. Thus the icons of smoke and blood came to be indistinguishable in visual form; both are rendered as a bifurcated scroll, the specific reference for which is determined by context or by the addition of modifying signs. In order to make this scroll understood indisputably as blood, the Maya added precious signs, such as bone beads or shells to its basic configuration. Maya cosmological symbolism suggests that the building element of the Middleworld was blood; it was certainly the most precious and sacred substance of this world.

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Furthermore, bloodletting was not practiced only by the humans; the gods themselves gave their blood to maintain the order of the cosmos. The actors letting blood from their penises on the Huehuetenango vase, for example, are divine (Pl. 72). The Perforator God is floating in a red field defined as supernatural space by the presence of gods above and cartouches below the glyph for bloodletting itself. Glyphs on this vase specify that the time and place of the action are supernatural. Even though the mythological context for this action is not yet clear, evidently the gods, like men, were required to let blood.

The result of divine bloodletting is shown on the magnificently carved Acasaguastlan pot (Pl. 73). The Sun God, the deity having the vision, sits in the center of the scene holding in each arm a Vision Serpent; they fold out from him as mirrored opposites, meting head to head on the other side of the pot. The serpent in the god’s right arm spits out the sun; its rail is night. Sitting just behind its head is a human, perhaps representing the king who commissioned the pot or all humans, creatures of the world of night and day. The turtle monster and crocodile (perhaps the front head of the Celestial Monster) move among the folds of the serpent’s body. The bird at the corner of the serpent’s mouth is a sky creature; the realized vision emerging from its mouth, the Sun God. The serpent on the left belches forth his realized vision—the watery deep of the Underworld, which is peopled with Death Gods, a deer-eared Celestial Monster, the personified flint of sacrifice and personified water. The world of the day is contrasted to the watery Underworld; they are the two opposite halves that make up the universe. The actor is a god; his sacrifice of blood creates a mirrored vision, and from that vision are created day and night, birds of the sky, the waters of the primordial sea in which the world floats, the plants of the earth, death and sacrifice. The god’s bloodletting vision is thus the whole cosmos.

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