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Yaxchilan lintel 24 & 25: Lady Xoc bloodletting from her tongue (left), and then seeing a vision serpent (right) |
Blood, Visions, and Prophecy in Maya Kingship
According to Linda Schele and Mary Ellen Miller, “The [Maya]
ruler was both human and god and, thus, the vehicle through which the sacred and
the profane interacted. The transformation of an heir into the king required
sanctification of the most sacred kind—human blood.”[2]
During a king’s coronation (or accession), he would receive the royal paraphernalia
from his parents (cf. Mosiah 1:16), and would participate in bloodletting
ceremonies where blood would be drawn from sensitive parts of his body.[3]
Arthur Demarest explained, “Royal bloodlettings were celebrated by
pronouncements before thousands in the great plazas and were memorialized in
stone sculptures.”[4]
In such bloodletting ceremonies, the king (and/or queen)
would drip their blood onto paper in a bowl. “The paper soaked in their sacred
royal blood was then burned, and in the smoke a ‘vision serpent’ would sometimes
appear.” Within the smokey haze, they would have “visions of prophesizing
deities or ancestors,” who were “presumably communicating sacred knowledge,
especially about future events and portents.”[5]
Schele and Miller argue that bloodletting went even further than that: “the act
of bloodletting literally gave birth to the gods,” and thereby “brought the
gods … into physical existence in human space and time.” This is evidenced by
texts describing the king as “the mother of the gods.”[6]
King Benjamin’s Discourse in a Maya Milieu
So Benjamin’s explicit denial of being more than a man
(Mosiah 2:10), no doubt accompanied by a complete absence of any bloodletting
rituals by either him or his heir (Mosiah), actually sets him apart from his
surrounding environment in a very important way. Yet King Benjamin does
appear to bring the ideas of kingship, blood, visions, and prophecy together in
ways reminiscent of this Mesoamerican backdrop.
Notice that, among the Maya:
- A divine king sheds his own blood
- This induces a vision, wherein the king sees a divine being or beings
- This divine being communicates sacred knowledge about future events to the king
- In some cases, this act was seen as bringing the gods into the human realm, into the presence of man
- Thus, bloodletting was seen as giving birth to the gods—with the king functioning as the “mother of the gods”
Now compare that to King Benjamin’s discourse:
- He disclaims being a divine king, but speaks of a true “heavenly king” (Mosiah 2:10, 19)
- Nonetheless, Benjamin still has a vision, wherein he speaks to an angel (Mosiah 3:2)
- This divine being communicates sacred knowledge about future events to Benjamin (Mosiah 3:3–27)
- This prophetic knowledge of the future pertains to a time when “the Lord omnipotent who reigneth”—the one, true “heavenly king”— will “come down from heaven among the children of men,” and “go forth amongst men” (Mosiah 3:5)
- The angel also revealed knowledge about the mother of the Lord omnipotent (Mosiah 3:8), “the mother of God,” as she was called by an earlier angel who appeared to Nephi (1 Nephi 11:18, 1830 version).
As was revealed to Benjamin, this God among men, the one
true divine king, would shed his blood. But he would not merely bleed
from a single piercing, as did Maya kings. Oh no. This king would bleed “from
every pore, so great shall be his anguish” (Mosiah 3:7). “For
Mesoamericans,” Brant A. Gardner noted, “the Messiah’s bleeding from every pore would indicate the measure of his
self-sacrifice, involving, as it was, his entire body.”[7]
Furthermore, his blood sacrifice was atoning blood (Mosiah 3:11, 15, 16,
18); that is, it would not merely bring gods temporarily down into the presence
of man—it would overcome the effects of the fall, bringing men and women permanently
into God’s presence, able to stand at his right hand (cf. Mosiah 5:9). No Maya
king could do that—only the Lord Omnipotent’s blood had that kind of power
(Mosiah 3:17, 21; cf. 5:8).
King Benjamin’s Polemic Against Maya Kingship
Kingship, blood, visions, and prophecy are all connected within
the Mesoamerican world, as they are in Benjamin’s speech, but Benjamin turn’s
this relationship on its head. He did not claim to be divine, as other
kings did, and he did not shed his blood the way other kings did either. And
yet, he still had visions of divine beings who delivered prophetic
knowledge. This, in and of itself, would undermine the claims of neighboring
kings—if he had the same experiences they claimed to have without being
divine, without shedding his blood, then this would call into question
their claims about both divinity and blood.
If that wasn’t bad enough, however, the contents of Benjamin’s
divine communication were devastating to any competing king’s claim to divine
power: a true Divine King was coming, and His blood would be shed. And when
it was, it would all at once be a greater sacrifice, with greater power to
transform heaven and earth than that of all the Maya kings combined. Anyone relying
on the blood of these earthly kings would, ironically perhaps, receive the same
fate as the kingly blood—they would be tormented in unquenchable flames, “whose
smoke ascendeth up forever and ever” (Mosiah 3:27).
Within a Mesoamerican context, Benjamin’s masterful
discourse—Mosiah 3, in particular—becomes a potent polemic against the
institution of kingship as practiced within the Nephites surrounding culture.
At the same time, it draws on the very institutions and symbols of that culture
to underscore just how powerful the Atonement of Jesus Christ really is. No
wonder his people, upon hearing Benjamin’s teachings, fell to the earth, and
cried out, “O have mercy, and apply the atoning blood of Christ that we may
receive forgiveness of our sins, and our hearts may be purified; for we believe
in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who created heaven and earth, and all things;
who shall come down among the children of men” (Mosiah 4:2). Steeped in this
cultural milieu, Benjamin’s people received the message loud and clear.
[1]
See Stephen Houston and David Stuart, “Of Gods, Glyphs and Kings: Divinity and
Rulership among the Classic Maya,” Antiquity 70 (1996): 289–312. For
previous Latter-day Saint commentary on this, see Brant A. Gardner, Second
Witness: Analytical and Contextual Commentary on the Book of Mormon, 6
vols. (Greg Kofford Books, 2007), 3:125; Mark Alan Wright and Brant A. Gardner,
“The Cultural Context of Nephite Apostasy,” Interpreter 1 (2012): 41–45.
[2] Linda
Schele and Mary Ellen Miller, The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya
Art (New York, NY and Fort Worth, TX: George Braziller and Kimbell Art
Museum, 1986), 110. Cf. Wright and Gardner, “Cultural Context,” 47: “At the
summit of Mesoamerican hierarchical society was a king who represented a divine
lineage and whose ritual presence enacted both the presence of deity and the
power of blood sacrifice.”
[3]
Schele and Miller, Blood of Kings, 117, 179. See pp. 104, 110 for the
transfer of royal objects to the heir from their parents (often only
symbolically so, since their parents were typically dead when they ascended to
the throne). On royal paraphernalia, see also Mark Alan Wright, “Axes Mundi:
Ritual Complexes in Mesoamerica and the Book of Mormon,” Interpreter 12
(2014): 84–85. On bloodletting, see also Gardner, Second Witness, 3:152;
Wright and Gardner, “Cultural Context,” 51.
[4]
Arthur Demarest, Ancient Maya: The Rise and Fall of a Rainforest
Civilization (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 188–189. See
also Schele and Miller, Blood of Kings, 177–178.
[5]
Demarest, Ancient Maya, 184, 188.
[6] Schele
and Miller, Blood of Kings, 183–182. See also p. 182: “Bloodletting had
one final function for the Maya: to bring the gods into man’s presence.”
[7] Gardner,
Second Witness, 3:152.
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