Face-on view of ancient Maya Tripod Plate, symbolically depicting the Maya Cosmos (sketched by Linda Schele).
Plate 122
Tripod plate
Late Classic period, A.D. 600-800
Polychromed ceramic
Diam. ca. 31 cm [12.2 in.]
Private collection
(Source: Linda Schele, sketch of ancient Maya Tripod Plate.)
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Archaeologists Linda Schele and David Freidel describe this remarkable ceramic piece, in their intriguing book “A Forest of Kings” (quoting…):
Fortunately for us, one of the greatest of Maya painters* left us an eloquent representation of the cosmos as his people understood it to exist. This image was painted on a tripod plate which was intended to hold the blood that helped open a portal to the Otherworld. The opened portal itself is depicted as the Maw of the Underworld, a great bearded and skeletal-jawed serpent. Out of the jaws of this serpent come the pure, life-bearing waters of the earth and below them flow the dark, fecund waters of the Underworld.
Along the upper edge of the image arches the living sky, the Cosmic Monster, which contains within its body the great ancestral sun and Venus. The rains, its holy blood, flow in great scrolls from the mouth of its crocodilian head and from the stingray spine on the Quadripartite Monster at the opposite end. The World Tree, _Wacah Chan_, emerges from the head of the god Chac-Xib-Chac (the Eveningstar) as he rises from the black waters of the portal. The trunk of the World Tree splits to become the Vision Serpent, whose gullet is the path taken by the ancestral dead and the gods of the Otherworld when they commune with the king as the forces of nature and destiny.
*This plate was painted by the same artist who executed the famous Altar de Sacrificios vase.
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(Source: Linda Schele and David Freidel, “A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of the Ancient Maya,” Quill/William Morrow, New York, 1990; pp. 69-70, Note 11: p. 426.)
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Schele along with Mary Ellen Miller, in their book “The Blood of Kings,” noted earlier — from which the present photo was originally (since modified) drawn — further describe this piece as follows (quoting…):
This shallow, tripod plate is a self-contained symbolic representation of all the imagery of Maya cosmos and ritual interaction. Painted in the codex-style, the outside of the plate is identified as the surface of the watery Underworld by a water band with water-lily pads and water shells floating along it. The interior surface is divided into two pictorial fields: the imagery on the walls establishes the framework of the narrative action that is shown on the bottom plane. This surrounding frame is itself divided into two opposing domains.
Below, the rear head of the Vision Serpent sits in the center with personified water-lilies and blood streams growing from the top of its head. The water-lilies are contained on both sides by skeletal dragons like those on the sarcophagus lid at Palenque. The bottom of the frame is, then, the Maw of the Underworld in which the bloody water of Xilbalba floats.
The top of the frame constitutes the other half of the circle: the heavens represented by the Celestial Monster. On the right, the front crocodilian head falls into the scene from the red rim. His mouth is open and his tongue is personified with a serpent eye and teeth. His eyelid is a Venus sign and other additional Venus signs hang from his body defined by the red rim, which arcs around the plate to the rump of the Monster on the opposite side. The legs are in motion and crocodilian in form; a personified Imix-Water-lily glyph is attached to his elbow; the Quadripartite Monster hangs from his rump, head down and facing outward. A personified blood stream emerges from the stingray spine in the center of its _kin_-bowl forehead.
The scene encompasses the Celestial Monster and the domain of heaven in the upper arch, and the blood and water standing in the open Maw of the Underworld in the lower arch. The action occurs in the Middleworld in a lake of black water, complete with water stacks and scrolls, that rises from the Underworld water. It is marked by the same water-lily uinal sign that occurs in the water register on Tablet 14. Under the water are three figures, two inverted and one right side up. A leaf sign, a reference to the World Tree, identifies the inverted figure on the right as an ancestor. The other two may also be ancestors or perhaps Xibalbans living under the waters of the earth.
Chac-Xib-Chac stands waist deep in the water holding an ax in one hand. Blood spurts from the stump of his amputated left hand. He wears the appropriate shell earflare and diadem, but the top of his head merges into the image of a fantastic tree. God C is on its base, marking it as the great World Tree on Pacal's sarcophagus. The trunk curves to the left, then forks into two branches. The right branch leads through two zoomorphic heads to culminate in a leaf at its summit, the same leaf worn by Chan-Bahlum on Tablet 14 and held by Pacal on the Dumbarton Oaks Tablet. The fork transforms into a Vision Serpent with the bulbous-nosed serpent head at the end of the left branch and the God C personified blood head at the midpoint of the right branch. Blood signs and blood scrolls are attached to the body at several points. As at Palenque, the trunk of the tree is God C and the branches of the tree are blood and the vision.
Normally the Celestial Bird sits in the Tree, but in this scene Chac-Xib-Chac's twin, the Water-lily Jaguar, has climbed the Tree after the Bird, who hovers above him in panicked flight. The Jaguar gazes up from his branch, roaring his frustrations. The Bird, apparently wounded by the Jaguar, bleeds from a gaping wound in his breast.
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(Source: Linda Schele and Mary Ellen Miller, The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art, George Braziller, Inc., New York, 1986; pp. 310-311.)
