stylistic:style_transfer
Kingship

The early Spanish writers have little to say about the king's (or, as the case might be, queen's) ritual duties. Nonetheless, one finds the Yucatec king (halach uinic) referred to as 'bishop', so that, in virtue of his office, the king appears to have had a leading role in major public rituals. In the Classic period, the rituals of kingship were the most important rituals of the Maya court. The term ' theatre state ' (Geertz), originally coined for the Hindu kingdoms of Bali, could also be used for describing the Classic Maya kingdoms; it suggests the cohesion of the state to be dependent on elaborate royal rituals through which status differences between aristocratic families could find expression. On monuments, the king sometimes assumes a dancing posture suggestive of his participation in the rituals that were staged on the large plazas where the royal stelae stood. On important occasions, the royal impersonator would be shown to the crowd while being within a shrine erected on a large palanquin (as on a wooden lintel from Tikal 's Temple IV).

The specific rituals engaged in by the king are only rudimentarily known. The Postclassic Kʻicheʻ king together with his dignitaries regularly visited the temples to burn offerings and pray for the prosperity of his people, while fasting and guarding sexual abstinence. As to the Classic Period king, he appears at times (often period-ending dates) to be scattering blood, incense or, perhaps, maize. At other times, the king, represented by the hero Hunahpu, is sacrificing his own blood in front of directional trees (murals of San Bartolo), or he is officiating in front of such a tree (Cross temple sanctuaries of Palenque).

The king not only took a leading part in ritual, but ritual is likely to have focused on his office as well. The erection of stelae showing the king and dedicated to the day 'King' (Ahaw), which concluded intervals of five 360-day years, constituted a royal ritual by itself. It appears to implicate the king as the divine lord of his own day. Inversely, at San Bartolo, the divine hero of the day 'King', Hunahpu, substitutes for the real king. Setting up a stela may additionally have involved the notion of the king as a protective 'tree of life'. Moreover, in the Classic period, the king is commonly depicted holding a cosmic serpent from whose jaws deities (often those of rain, lightning and fire) emerge; the king's raising and balancing of this serpent, accompanied by his 'conjuring' of the emerging deities, may well have been expressed and supported by ritual.