Source: Linda Schele and Mary Ellen Miller. The Blood of Kings; Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art. Fort Worth: Kimbell Art Museum, 1986, p. 199, plate 63.
Comments: Here we see a bloodletting vision quest of a Vision Serpent on a bas-relief carving from the Yaxchilán Lintel 25. During the Classic Period, Yaxchilán was an ancient Mayan city-state alongside the Usumacinta River in present-day Chiapas, México. A lintel is the area surrounding a doorway. The Usumacinta River is known as the "sacred river of the Maya."
Schele and Miller's description: This lintel "shows the consequence and purpose of the bloodletting rite (Pl. 63). The same woman, still kneeling, gazes upward at an apparition, a Tlaloc warrior, emerging from the gaping mouth of a Vision Serpent. In her left hand she holds a bloodletting bowl with the bloody paper, a stingray spine and an obsidian lancet; in the right hand, a skull and serpent symbol. The Vision Serpent rises from a separate bowl placed on the ground in front of her. The serpent is double headed, perhaps as a reminder of the royal scepter and the fact that the occasion of the rite is Shield Jaguar's accession. The serpent's writhing body surges upward through a blood scroll, declaring that the vision materializes from blood itself. The Tlaloc god and warrior brought forth refer to a special sacrificial complex that the Maya associated with the god of the evening star and with war... it is clear that the purpose of the bloodletting rite was to cause this vision to materialize" (p. 177). For detail of this panel: => #9a.
Latin American humanities motifs: religio; mythic stylization; horror vacui.